


X Marks the Spot

by alpha_hydra



Series: When Our Wounds Will Fade to Black [1]
Category: Red Hood: Lost Days, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: ALSO also finally decided to add the ship tag since I finally decided to actually include the ship, Gen, M/M, aka help i got some jason todd in my YJ, also keep an eye out for the rest of the YJ squad, and past!Dick/Roy, because i have a lot of them, happens almost immediately after YJ Invasion finale, just noticed there are brief mentions of past Dick/other in this chap, mostly I just wanted an excuse to add jay to the young justice batfam feels, oh no a wip, so past!Dick/Zatanna
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-06
Updated: 2016-09-27
Packaged: 2017-12-14 02:57:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/831905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpha_hydra/pseuds/alpha_hydra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nightwing sees a ghost, and the little birds and bats are tasked with bringing him home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this relies heavily on a few things that happened in Red Hood: The Lost Days and basically all of Young Justice. There are also some elements from Teen Titans thrown in there because why not? The rating may or may not go up as we progress, but for now, yeah. Rated for all 'em naughty words, and a little violence. Unbeta'd because baffingly nonexistent reasons.

**North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany – 10 November – 12: 34am**

It's a relatively simple mission, considering. The only significant thing about it is that it's Dick's last mission with The Team for a while. He's not done with the whole crime-fighting thing; it's been part of his life for almost a decade now, and honestly Dick isn't sure he could quit it even if he tried. But after Wally—well, he's feeling a little whelmed about it. Like he told Kal, he needs time to screw his head on right. 

But, well, one last mission won't hurt. 

Purely reconnaissance, Kal'd said, and for now, things seem to be going according to plan. The moon's nearly full, but it's obscured by the dark storm clouds that have been overhead all night. By Dick's guess, a blizzard will hit the area tonight, maybe tomorrow if they're lucky. For now, the heavy cloud cover keeps everything almost pitch dark, and with all the extra cover, Dick's pretty confident his team can remain unnoticed. Bumblebee, Static, and Beast Boy are circling the perimeter, keeping a careful eye on everyone in the area; they don't want any fuck-ups here, not with these thugs.

Egon, their target, is suspected of being not only an assassin with ties to Deathstroke and possibly The Light itself, but there's also whispers that he runs a massive drug trafficking ring. He's been a target of Batman's on more than one occasion, but he's also harder to pin down than half the crooked politicians on Capitol Hill. Bruce's never been able to make the charges stick. The team's objective tonight is to obtain enough evidence to bring the guy in, or at least find out if he's got ties to The Light. 

Dick's watching what looks to be Egon's personal living area, a one-room shack in the middle of a dense forest. The light's on, and Dick's watching through his binoculars for any sort of movement. Around him, the night is eerily quiet.

“I'm just saying, my sis can totally do better than La'gann,” Beast Boy whispers into the comm.

“You just want her to get back together with Superboy,” Bumblebee snaps back.

“Well, yeah sure,” Gar says, like it's the simplest thing in the world. Dick can only just make out the faint outline of a falcon swoop over a few trees in the distance. He wonders if it's green or not; in this light, it looks inky black. “M'gann and Conner belong together.”

“That's not how relationships work.”

“Is this a normal topic of conversation to have when we're in the middle of recon?” Static's voice chimes in, just a tad unsure. 

Dick switches to infrared with a quick flick of a switch, smirking at the angry huff of breath that sounds over the com. There's only one heat signature in Egon's cabin and it's—huh. 

“Beta squad,” Dick says sharply, cutting off the chatter on the line, “there's a weird heat signature on the body. Going in.”

“What does that mean?” Gar asks. Dick slips into the shadows of the building, notices the broken latch on the window. “What kind of weird heat signature?”

“It means the target's already dead,” Static says, proving that he's a smart kid, and it was a good idea to let him onto the team. “Didn't you notice? He said 'body', not 'target'.”

“Nightwing, you need backup in there? I can get to you in less than two minutes.”

“Negative Bee,” Dick says. He frowns one last time at the broken window latch, slips in silently. “I got this.”

The desk's been overturned, papers strewn around like a hurricane hit. In the center of the tiny space lies Egon, face down, body turned towards the still locked door. The body's been lying here for a while, because when Dick flips him over carefully, his arms remain outstretched over his head, fingers splayed like he was reaching for something. There are no obvious bloodstains, no signs of serious trauma, just a bruise forming over his right eye—doesn't look like it would have even caused a concussion—a little dried blood on his split knuckles. Poison, maybe? But who would start a fist fight with one of Germany's most deadly assassins after poisoning them?

Maybe there was more than one killer? 

It doesn't make any sense. Dick takes a few swabs of blood from Egon's knuckles, for once hoping Egon hit the other guy hard enough to draw blood. 

“Uhh, Nightwing?” Gar sounds uncertain over the com, not-quite afraid, but close to it. “I just found like, 50 kids hiding out in the woods. They've definitely been drugged.”

“Are any of them injured?”

“Not really? It doesn't look like it. But they're not wearing much. In this weather...”

“Me and Static are enroute to you, Beast Boy,” Bumblebee answers.

Dick frowns again. He definitely doesn't like this.

“What are they doing here?” Dick asks, mostly to himself.

“They said they'd been kidnapped, but someone freed them,” Gar answers. “Guys, is it just me, or is this mission getting kinda weird?”

“Four superheroes alone in the woods at night?” Bumblebee says. “Only the start of a really cheesy horror film.”

“Hey, it could be worse,” Dick adds, climbing out the window and up to the rooftop. “Nothing's blown up yet.”

“Don't say that, man,” Static says. “You'll jinx us.”

Dick's very witty reply to that is interrupted by, as luck would have it, a giant explosion around the lump of cabins Dick had passed earlier. Close to where Gar's perimeter would have been. He supresses a small curl of panic at the thought.

“Beast Boy, report. Are you guys okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, we're all fine,” Gar's squeaks, several octaves higher than normal. “That was just—really close, is all.”

From his vantage point, Dick can mostly see a figure silhouetted against the flames. He pulls out his binoculars.

“You had to jinx it,” Bumblebee mutters.

“My bad. I'll make sure to watch...my...”

But he trails off, conversation momentarily forgotten. The person's turned away from the flames, and the orange light throws his features into sharp relief. Dick hits the record button on his binoculars, feels all the breath leave him at once. For one heart-stopping moment, Dick is _sure_ the man is looking right at him. The corner of the guy's lips quirk up a little. Dick suppresses the wild urge to wave or call out to him, and after a second, he slips away into the treeline. 

“Target is moving your way,” Dick says, maybe gasps out. He takes a sharp breath, forcing his hands to steady. “Repeat, suspect is on the move, heading your way.”

“I got him,” Bumblebee says. 

Dick nearly flies off the roof, rolling into a full sprint. Already his breath is coming in short, painful rasps, like he's forgotten how to breathe right, like maybe there's a knife somewhere between his lungs and stomach.

“Suspect is most likely armed and dangerous.” 

Dick's Leader Instincts kick in, logically reminding himself that Egon was one of Batman's most paranoid and well-connected non-superpowered problems, and if someone can get the drop on him, they've got to be dangerous. He has to stay impartial here, and anyway the lighting was weird; he didn't get too good of a look at—the suspect.

“Yeah, well so am I,” Bumblebee adds, and Dick can nearly hear the smirk in her voice.

He tears through the surrounding forest, nearly slipping on the slick half-slurry coating the underbrush. Bumblebee meets him in a clearing halfway, looking ready for a fight.

“I didn't find him, are you sure he—woah. Nightwing, you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

“I'm good,” Dick snaps, and opens a line directly to the Watchtower. “Kaldur, I need you to recall Batgirl and Robin from wherever they are.”

There's a pause on the other end of the line, like Aqualad wasn't expecting him to call so soon. 

“Is your mission complete, Nightwing?”

“Negative. We've got a group of kids we can't account for and need to sort out. Egon's been neutralized and his assailant has escaped.”

“I see,” Kal sounds thoughtful, but then thoughtful is Kal's default expression, so that doesn't tell Dick much. “Batgirl is with team Alpha in Taos, and Robin is in Gotham on Batman's orders.”

“Get them to the Watchtower; Batman too, if he'll come. This is—this is important.”

“Is this urgent?” Kaldur asks after a long pause. “You sound distressed.”

“I'm fine,” and this time when he lies, his voice breaks a little. A conveniently blatant tell.

“Very well. Aqualad out.”

The silence around them feels equal parts accusatory and concerned. Dick shakes his head once, trying to clear the buzzing out of there, heads to Gar and Static's location. Bumblebee disappears, says something about looking for the guy, he can't have gone far. Dick lets her, doesn't even notice how long it takes him to stumble over the last few hundred yards to Gar and Static. 

“What was that all about?” Gar asks. 

His eyes look huge in his head, too-wide with concern. 

“Are you sure you're okay?” Static asks with a frown.

“Yeah,” Dick says, manages to paste on a smile. “Just having a little family trouble.”

Bumblebee joins them later, empty handed and in a sour mood. After that, it takes hours to sort the whole mess out. Apparently, instead of drugs Egon had his hand in a massive child trafficking ring. If the man wasn't already a charred corpse, Dick would try to rip the guy's head off. Who would do that to a bunch of kids? 

Finally, the leave the kids with the US embassy with enthusiastic promises that everything will be sorted out. By the time they reach the nearest zeta tube and reach the Watchtower, everyone's exhausted. Dick lets them all go home and get some sleep, waits until he's sure they've all left before he uploads the video feed from his binoculars. There's a secondary touchscreen tucked away into an unobtrusive corner of the room, which Dick chooses over the giant, floor-to-ceiling view screen in the center of the room. 

It's a short clip, less than 10 seconds long. He watches it almost a dozen times, zooming in as far as he can before the picture starts to pixellate. He'd give his right arm for sound right now, because that's when he notices the guys lips move, like maybe he muttered something, like maybe he said something _to Dick_.

He hits pause, stares at the image for so long he almost goes cross-eyed. In the image, the kid is undeniably watching the camera. The weird stripe of white in his bangs reflects light off the flames, and even though the video is paused to a single frame, it makes it look like he's moving. Just a little, forward and backwards movements, the tiny smirk almost taunting. 

Dick doesn't know how long he stares at the image, but eventually he hears the click of Babs's boots and Robin's nearly silent shuffle. 

“Dick, are you okay?” Then Barbara's boots stop. “Where did you get this?”

“Is that—”

“Germany,” Dick answers, because he can't answer Tim's half-formed question. That's why he called them here. But that constricting feeling is back around his lungs. He feels so sure about this. “The whole place burned to the ground. J—this was the only person who survived.”

“You think he caused it?” 

There's a weird look on Tim's face as he asks that, maybe disappointment. Dick isn't prepared to interpret it, not with Tim's mask on. 

“I don't know. I don't even know how he got to _Germany_. Or if I'm seeing things or. I mean. That's—but it can't be. He's supposed to be dead. And this,” he gestures at the screen again. “This is—”

“Jason Todd.”

The three of them turn, nearly as one, to the entryway. Batman, shrouded by his cape, looms towards them, the tiniest frown on his lips. 

“Yeah,” Dick says. He swallows, tries to get rid of the sudden dryness of his throat. “That's what I was thinking too.”

They move the conversation (ensuing argument) to the Batcave after that, Dick thinks probably because Bruce is afraid of showing so much emotion in such a public place. First thing Bruce does is take the recording and run it through every test he can think of to—well, Dick's not sure what at least half of those tests do. At least some of them are to clear up the image, run face-recognition software. He doesn't bring up Jason's mugshot, not yet. 

Up on the giant Batcave screen, the resemblance is even more uncanny. He's bigger, wider in the shoulder than he was at 15, but then it's been two years since they put him in the ground. Two years is a long time. Long enough apparently, for Jason to have ended up in Germany. 

“So are we gonna go looking for him?” Tim asks after an unbearably long silence. When no one answers him, he continues. “If it is Jason—”

“Of course it is,” Dick says right as Bruce snaps “We can't be sure of that.”

“Are you kidding?” Dick waves his arms a little for emphasis. They hadn't been there, is the thing. They weren't the ones who'd stared into this guys eyes. He wants to shake Bruce until the man understands. Dick had _been there_. He'd seen him. “You're the one who was so quick to ID him in the first place!”

“Dick, we need to maintain some level of objectivity here,” Barbara says in her best Batgirl Knows Best Voice. “Jason's—he's dead, Dick. We had him _autopsied_. And if it is somehow him—”

“It is.”

“ _If_ it is,” Babs steamrolls over him, “how do we know he's still our Jason? For all we know, he could be brainwashed, or mind-controlled, or another clone from Cadmus.”

“But we are going to look for him, right?” Tim asks again into the ensuing silence. “I mean, whether or not that's Jason Todd, he still either killed Egon and blew up those warehouses, or he knows who did it. Plus, we'll need a DNA sample for a solid ID, right?”

Tim focuses the explanation to Bruce's back, no doubt trying to appeal to the unstoppable, ironclad logic the Batman is notorious for. Finally Bruce faces them again. 

“You three will find him and bring him back. If this is Jason, we need to find out how and why he's still alive. Robin, you're leading this mission.”

“What, me?” Tim's voice squeaks a little, his eyes dart frantically from Barbara, to Batman, to Dick. To Batman again. “Are you sure?”

Somehow, Dick manages to dredge up a smile for the kid. He claps him on the shoulder reassuringly. 

“Babs is right,” he says. “We need to stay objective. And of all of us, you're the one who can best do that.” He shares an apologetic smile with Barbara. “You'll do fine, Tim.” 

“We trust you, Boy Wonder,” Barbara adds. 

“This mission is not to be discussed with the rest of The Team,” Batman says. “Jason was one of ours. He's our responsibility. If he is alive, we'll bring him home.”

“Keep it in the Batfamily,” Dick agrees, grins a little when both Barbara and Tim shake their heads at him. 

“I'll arrange to have his coffin exhumed later on today,” Batman rumbles, turning back to his computer banks. “You're dismissed.”

They all turn and head up to the winding staircase at that. Dick doesn't think he can stomach a night alone in his tiny Blüdhaven loft, not after tonight. With the time jump from Germany, to outer space, to Gotham, the sun's only just coming up when they reach the ground level, but Dick heads to his old bedroom in an exhausted haze. The day's emotional and physical exertions are finally taking a toll, and he can feel himself crashing. Tim and Babs stick close, Dick thinks out of a serious concern that he'll keel over and sleep in the middle of the hallway if they don't escort him to his room. Which only happened once, and neither of them were even around back then. When they reach his room, he stares at the doorknob for a few seconds, almost bewildered, and finally Barbara wraps him up into a hug, Tim following suit seconds later.

“Don't worry, Dick. If he's out there, we'll find him”

“Just like Bats said,” Tim adds, his voice muffled a little from where he's mashed his face against Dick's chest, “we'll bring him home.”

Dick clings to them both, some of the painful, constricting pressure around his lungs finally easing a little.

“Yeah,” he says, and hopes like hell it's true.

*

Jason paces the length of a dingy loft in a long condemned building. _Shit,_ he thinks every other circuit of the room. _Shit, shit. Shit._

He's fucked up. There's no other way around it. He should've just, he doesn't know, blown the place and disappeared. Hell, he could've detonated his bombs remotely; it's not like Jason doesn't know how. He'd had the time. But no, Jason had to stick around, had to watch, make sure the place became less than a smear on the ground. 

Now everything depends on what dear old Dickiebird thought he saw.

Jason'd spotted that stupid blue bird on his costume almost immediately; the fire had given off just enough light to reflect off the snow. And in the faintly glittering backdrop, even with Dick's winter gear on, his dark hair and blue logo had stood out. Dick hasn't changed much, but two years, a growth spurt, and Death stand between the Jason Dick probably remembers and the man he is now. Plus, the light coming off the blaze might have obscured Dick's vision. There's a chance Dick hadn't recognized him.

Right. Jason's not willing to bet on that, not with his luck.

But shit. If Dick had recognized him, there is no way in Gotham he hasn't already gone blabbing about it to Bruce. And Jay—he's not ready to face the Batman, not yet. He doesn't even have a plan yet besides Kill the Joker and Add a Little Psychological Torture in for Batman. He's not even sure if killing the Bat is still on the table (he isn't sure when he'd shelved that idea, but it—he's been shying away from the thought and just. It's been shelved, okay? Just for now).

Okay, well. First thing: he needs to get gone, possibly yesterday. Talia will be able to help him disappear again. Then he'll need to—he'll need to—well he'll figure that out when he gets there. Up his whole timetable, maybe. Something. 

What had Talia told him before he left to train with Egon again?

_Communication blackout,_ his memory helpfully supplies in Talia's voice. _We'll find you._

Perfect. But fuck, he wasn't a sidekick to the World's Greatest Detective for nothing. He'll find her. 

It doesn't take very long, all things considered, to knock out a few of Talia's goons. Maybe Jason's a little rougher on them than he should be, but then these guys have been trailing Jay almost since Talia pushed him off that cliff-side, so he's got no qualms knocking the guys out with a few hard knocks to the head. Only problem is that now he's got to wait around until the knuckleheads come-round, severely hampering his “Get gone, ASAP” plan. 

Oh well. Life is tough when you're plotting. 

Jason busies himself with packing up the meager belongings he's acquired over the past few weeks, carefully stowing his newer gadgets into the extra pockets in his leather jacket. Jay's never been one to accumulate stuff, which is fine when he's living and training with an assassin and his goons, but it's a little depressing when packing takes a little under ten minutes. He's cleaning his favorite Browning pistol when Goon #1 startles awake with an overly dramatic gasp. 

“Hey man,” Jay says pleasantly, sliding an oil-slick rag up the barrel of his gun. “You must've drifted off for a minute there. That's okay though; happens to the best of us.”

“What do you want with us?” Goon #1 says. His shoulders shake, like he's dubious about Jason's knot-tying skills. “You know we work for Talia.”

“Aren't we a smart cookie.” Jason fingers the slide top of his pistol, a little idly. “That's mostly why you're tied up in a chair, honestly, and not dead. Plus, I don't like that you've been tailing me.”

He smirks and with a couple quick movements, has his gun reassembled and pointed right between Goon #1's eyeballs. Then Goon #2 wakes up with a truly pitiful sounding moan. 

“She is so lucky I'm sleeping with her,” Goon #2 mutters, his eyes still closed. “Because I don't get paid nearly enough for this.”

“There we go,” Jason almost purrs. He's enjoying himself way too much. “You're the man I'm after then. Where's Talia?”

The guy clams up; Jay would think it funny if he wasn't a little short on time. He rolls his eyes, swaggers over to the two of them and crouches down by Goon #2.

“Here's the deal. I just need to know where Talia is. Now, you _know_ I've got no beef with her, so why don't we just give the psycho with a gun the information he wants?”

“Why are you so interested? Do you need for her to find you another murderer to train under?”

“I wanna give her my PO box,” Jason says. “Let her know how to find me when I blow this continent.”

“You'll never get away with this,” Goon #1 says like he's in some sort of action flick. 

Jason briefly entertains the bright, technicolor daydream of shooting the guy's brains out. Instead, he aims the gun over at Goon #1 and casually shoots out the front chair leg. He goes crashing to the ground with a small oomph sound.

“The adults are talking now, dear.” Jason uses his most patronizing voice, the one he learned from listening to Alfred backtalk Bruce. He turns back to Goon #2, who isn't fidgeting in his bonds as much as Goon #1. “You gonna tell me what I want to know?”

“That depends. Are you going to kill us?”

Jason smiles again, mostly teeth. Esteban the marksman used to say Jay looked like a shark with that smile on. 

“Nah,” he finally decides. “So long as you don't lie to me.”

Goon #2 hesitates a little, flickers his eyes over to where #1 is failing at picking himself up.

“We don't know where exactly she went,” he begins. At Jay's unimpressed look, he continues quickly, “But we do know that she went looking for her father. He was recently mortally wounded.”

“Ra's is dead?”

“You cannot kill the Demon's Head,” Goon #1 mumbles from the floor. Jason has the feeling that he'd sound more earnest if his face wasn't mashed into the floorboards. “Ra's Al Ghul is immortal.”

“Yeah yeah, I get it,” Jason says. He pushes up from his crouched position. “Scared Daddy wouldn't make it to the homestead on his own, huh?”

He doesn't get a response from either man. Jason shrugs; if Talia's out looking for Ra's, that means he's on his own. Ra's still wants Jason dead, and fuck if Jason's going to walk right into the League of Shadows on a silver platter. He tucks his gun into the waistband of his jeans, pulls on his jacket and grabs his threadbare backpack.

“Hey, you said you would let us go!” Goon #1 cries when Jason's nearly out the door.

“I said I wouldn't kill you.” Jason doesn't bother turning back. “Big difference.”

Three-and-a-half hours later, he's riding in the belly of a cargo ship heading to New York. So he's going with Plan B, then.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The plan is to lie low. Unsurprisingly, the plan fails.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same as for the whole work. Still on the fence about any pairings (because, well the OTP is the OTP, but all the other Jay-pairings are so tempting rn ;) ) I don't know what a decent amount of time in between chapters is, but summer II classes are about to start, and while my schedule isn't as full as it was last month, more shit may crop up in July and August. Hopefully this doesn't mean I go MIA.

Jason's been a thief for most of his life. He has two years (best of his life) where he'd been the law enforcement for once, but before that, nine times out of 10 he'd been on the wrong side of the law. 

Still, he's no criminal. Back before everything, the closest he ever got to anything worse than a little petty theft was those few times his mom sent him on errands. Sprawled across their lonely mattress, crashing hard and fast, she'd send Jay out into the night with a dirty envelope stuffed with—Jason never looked but could pretty much guess—money. He'd met with terrifying, vulture-like people for tiny packets of white powder, and when they'd sneer at him, something in Jason's eight-and-a-half year old brain had recoiled at the sight. 

After Mom'd died, well, it's not like Jason really had a choice. It's easy to slip out of Gotham's foster system, Jay thinks that if Harvey fucking Dent and his brilliantly short reign as District Attorney couldn't change that, nothing will. If no one's actively looking for you, no one would report you missing. And no one cared about Jason. After six months he'd ditched his second foster home without so much as a “fuck you.”

No one in their right mind would ever hire a nine-year-old, though, not even in the worst districts of Gotham. So yeah, he's done a lot of illegal shit over the years—stealing scraps of bread at nine, a few wallets from rich guys in suits at 11, once a whole damn pizza he'd magnanimously shared with the other street kids—but that'd all been simple survival. No way anyone could call it anything else.

Basically, now he's working off the same principle. He doesn't even think assault counts as a crime anymore, to any of their kind, but he—. Well. Sure, he's had his hand in drug rings, assassination organizations, but that could hardly count against him. He's never wanted to be involved in any of that stuff. It just all pales in comparison to Jason's overall plan.

(Besides, Batman had done it. He'd trained with scum just like this, maybe worse, maybe The Worst, because Jason knows when he's being taught the abridged-version, and oh, did Daddy ever pull out the training wheels on his little birdies' training. If Gotham's protector can get away with a little crime in the name of the bigger picture, then Jay sure as Hell is exploiting that.)

But he's no murderer. Egon and his men, they were less than scum. As far as Jason is concerned, all he's doing is taking out the trash. He's a criminal, sure, but he's not a bad guy.

Still, it's hard to remember that after spending 10 days hiding in the lowest deck of a barge with the sewer rats of Eastern Europe. It's easy to keep to himself though, and mostly if he ignores 90% of what he hears, he can prevent the murderous rage from boiling out of his veins.

It's still is a long time, especially when you don't trust the company you're keeping worth a shit. Halfway through he hopes he doesn't start hallucinating from the lack of sleep. It does, however, give him a lot of time to think. He decides somewhere over the Atlantic that his best bet right now is to lie low. As low as possible. Like, not even cause a blip on the radar. Batman may or may not believe Nightwing about Jason's sudden reappearance—if Dick even saw him, if Dick believes it's actually him—but Jay's going to plan for the worst case scenario. That is, the whole damn Gotham crew is out looking for him. Any whisper about even someone vaguely fitting Jason's description will get back to Bruce, so Jason just needs to stay out of the crime circuit for a while. Eventually, the Bats and the birds will fly home, Talia will find him, and he'll get back to training with murderers and bring back Plan A.

First thing Jason figures he needs is cash, and a few games of poker are the quickest way to earn the most honest cash he's seen this side of resurrection. But that just leaves him with not-quite 200 bucks to his name when they finally land in New York. He's got absolutely no contacts here, and with his newly minted stay-out-of-trouble rule, he's not sure what to do next. 

He buys a hot dog at the first place he sees, figures he might as well scope the neighborhood out and ends up taking a long, meandering walk through Sheepshead Bay. The mid-afternoon sunlight shines weakly over the city, almost sullen and moody. At least the sky's relatively clear. A biting chill sweeps in over the bay, and for a second Jason's almost grateful for the last nine weeks in Germany. After suffering through a blizzard in a shitty cabin with no heat, a little wind chill is nothing. 

He finds a nice little apartment complex on an abandoned-looking block, the building looking like it's ready to be demolished by the state. Two rooms plus a bathroom, no real place to hide in a firefight, but all its walls are standing, and the only window (big, bay window in what is probably supposed to be the living room) overlooks the neighborhood, Brooklyn Bridge hides behind the dirty walls of the nearest buildings. It doesn't have a view of the bay, but then he doesn't technically need one (if he likes to look out over a water-scape, maybe pretend he's back in Gotham about to do his rounds that is _nobody's damn business but his own_ , okay?). 

All in all, it's not a bad place. Jay considers this against the warehouse he'd found in the business district, which is dank and dark, plenty of shadowy places to hide even in the middle of the day. Warehouses are so cliché though. He debates defense versus ease of escape for a while, before slipping out the abandoned building with the intent of finding that hot dog stand again. 

Halfway there he hears the unmistakeably sounds of a muffled scuffle. Jason follows his ears before he even has a chance to think better of it. Ends up at the mouth of a dark alley with the sun only just beginning to set behind him. One-two-three-four-five different sets of feet clomping about like they don't know a damn thing about subtlety. Something heavy scraping across asphalt. Jason sighs. This can end in nothing but disaster. 

_Remember the rule,_ he thinks to himself, even as he slides into the weak shadows, _not even a blip on the radar_. After a second, he reconsiders, stuffs his hands into his jacket pockets and whistles a jazzy tune. The noise rings out clearly in the evening, shuts up whoever's slinking around in the alleyway.

“Wait, listen,” a voice says in Russian. “Gleb, find the poor bastard dumb enough to be out right now. Andrei, stay with the woman.” 

Jason has a moment where he almost feels kinda bad for the dude named Gleb, but then a hulking wall of a man is pointing a glock in his general direction. That kind of ruins any sympathy Jay might have had for the dude's unfortunate name. Arms raised in a perfect mimicry of surprised fear, Jason takes a step back.

“Woah, hey there big guy, what are you—”

“Get out of here,” Gleb says in heavily accented English. He brandishes his gun (a little haphazardly) in a way that is probably supposed to be intimidating.

“Sure,” Jay answers easily enough. “Don't know the area too well though. Just got into town. How 'bout you walk me home?”

He resists the incredibly cheesy urge to waggle his eyebrows. From the dark, ugly look that flashes across old Gleb's face, Jay figures he probably could have added a wink in there, just to really piss the guy off. He swears in Russian for a little bit, then takes a few menacing steps closer. 

“If you want to live, you will leave now.”

“Wow, hey, do you practice that line in front of the mirror or something?” 

Jason can't help the slightly manic grin he sends the guy; his favorite pass-time in either life has always been riling assholes up. Gleb growls in frustration (actually growls! Who does this guy think he is?). Just as Jason hoped he would, the dumbass swings instead of shoots, changes his grip slightly to turn his gun into an ineffective baton. 

Perfect. The really dumb assholes always punch before they shoot. 

The first swing is wild, more anger than anything else, and Jason dodges it easily, springs up a fire escape and lands heavily on Gleb's shoulders. It's been a while since he's shown off, and anyway, the strangled squeal Gleb makes in surprise is deeply satisfying. Jason is _way_ too big for this move, and so it sends them both crashing to the floor in a tangled heap. Gleb's probable-bosses rush in from the other end of the darkened hallway—probably three of them, judging from the urgent voices.

“Sorry, Gleb buddy, but I don't have time for this,” he mutters in Russian, rolls out from under the man's shoulders. 

He spins a little with his weight on his shoulders, a move he'd learned from Dick, keeps his legs in the air until a foot connects solidly with the side of Gleb's skull. It sends him sprawling, and Jason has a split-second to really appreciate the sound Gleb's head makes when it smashes into the asphalt before the alleyway's filling with gunfire.

And Jason just—he just falls back into it, without even thinking. Easy as breathing, the old Robin instincts kick back in. His feet hardly touch the ground, and an almost giddy laugh bubbles out of him. They don't even try to reach their fallen comrade as their bullets ricochet wildly.

“That all you got?” Jason calls out, takes a rolling dive for Gleb's old gun and finds cover behind a dumpster. “A corpse could do better than this. Trust me, I'd know!”

The sun set sometime when Jay wasn't really looking, and it's easier than breathing to slip in behind them during a lull in their shooting, disarm one of them without even using his stolen gun. 

“Protect the shipment!” someone yells and bolts the fuck off. His partner isn't far behind.

“I didn't know you got me flowers,” Jason calls after them, jumps up into the nearest fire escape, slides into the shadows to follow them. “I'm touched, honestly.”

“Who are you?” One of the two dudes asks suddenly. He stops, spins around like a top, and even in the dimly lit alley, Jason can see the wild movements of his eyes, the way he searches in vain for Jay. “What do you want?”

For a second, Jason contemplates just shooting the two guys; he's got perfect head shots lined up from here, and even one-handed, holding onto the ledge of a windowsill, Jay could make the kill shots easily. Up here on his safe little perch, he's nearly invisible, and it would save him so much trouble if these morons were dealt with already. But, honestly? He's kind of enjoying letting his inner birdie fly free for now. He hasn't really enjoyed himself this much since before the Lazarus Pit, and well. Chances are dead bodies call more unwanted attention than a few beat up thugs anyway. 

Almost ten seconds tick by before Jason flips on the safety to his newly acquired weapon and tucks it into a shoulder holster. Instead, he eases himself down to a different fire escape, listens to them argue about whether or not he's some new superhero, swings himself down about ten feet to their left. 

“I'm telling you man, that was Blue Beetle,” one of them is saying.

“Blue Beetle is _blue,_ Andrei. No way that was that alien-loving freak”

_At least one of them has a name,_ Jason thinks to himself as he quietly sneaks up behind them. In one swift movement, he swipes “Andrei's” feet out from under him, kicks the gun out of his wildly flailing hands, and back hand-springs away when his nameless friend starts shooting again. He grabs a nice, long length of pipe while he's at it. Andrei's up again, yelling profanities in both Russian and English as he looks for his gun under a hail of bullets. Jason rolls his eyes.

These guys are so incompetent it's almost painful. He fishes for something in one of the inner pockets of his jacket.

“Pathetic,” he mumbles to himself, pulls the pin to the canister, and lets the smoke bomb roll away.

The two guys start coughing, yelling to one another as visibility starts going down. Jason covers his nose and mouth with a spare rag, wishes ruefully for either a full-face mask or at the very least one of Bruce's old rebreathers. But hell, he's got to make do with what he's got. After that, it's easy to follow their voices and knock the two out in the haze of smoke. 

He's breathing a little ragged by the time he stumbles out of the cloud of smoke, grip a little slack on his pipe, when he notices that good old Gleb is finally starting to come 'round. Before the guy can sit up properly, Jason's there, pushing him down flat against the floor again with the edge of his pipe. He can almost feel the way it digs into the delicate flesh of the guy's neck. Jason grins, all teeth, really fucking enjoys the way Gleb's eyes widen a little, the way he swallows audibly. 

“You know, I just wanted a nice, quiet night to myself,” Jason growls. He pulls out the gun, jingles it against his thigh restlessly. “I guess this is why I can't have nice things.”

“I—If you want me to talk, I will,” Gleb says, something like fear or panic in his voice. 

“I don't actually care,” Jason says, and tosses his pipe over his shoulder to take aim between the guy's eyeballs. 

The elation he'd felt during his fight is starting to fade now, a familiar, brittle sort of anger beginning to take its place. He's annoyed with himself because this is exactly the kind of thing he was supposed to avoid tonight, because he's not entirely sure if he wants to kill this guy or not. Jason's been training to (if not kill then at least) mortally wound people who probably haven't done anything more than this guy's done. As far as Jason can tell, he's not done anything to turn him into the scum that needs ending, but then again, Jason's killed for less than a rumor in the past nine months. 

It's also pretty great to watch Gleb squirm.

Just when he's about to lower his weapon and maybe disappear into the city again, a fucking _arrow_ comes out of nowhere and knocks the gun out of Jay's hand. Gleb scrambles up, but as he's running off, something else swishes by, tangles in the guy's feet and sends him crashing back to the floor.

A kid hops down from the closest rooftop and lands with a heavy thud beside Jay. He's 15, 16 at the most, and the short buzz cut makes him look even younger than that. He's dressed in red and black, cute little matching red bow slung over one shoulder.

“Are you fucking kidding me,” they end up saying at the exact same time. The scowl that brings to the kid's face makes Jason huff out a laugh under his breath.

“Who are you?” the kid asks, in one of those self-righteous voices that means he's been at the superhero gig for a while now. The kid holds out his arm, which now that Jason really looks at it, turns out to glint unnaturally in the dim light. A weird canon-thing pops out of the top of it as Jason watches and, well. Shit.

“No one,” Jason says because, what the hell; it's true.

“Right. That's why you just took out the head of one of Sheepshead's biggest drug rings in like, five minutes.”

“I didn't know who they were!” which, okay, he didn't really care, but that's not his problem anymore. “Besides, it's not my fault they don't know what they're doing.”

“You were carrying a smoke bomb.”

“A guy can't like the smell of tear gas and sodium bicarbonate in the evening?”

Arm-Gun Kid couldn't look less impressed if he tried.

“You expect me to believe you just carry shit like that around with you on a Tuesday night, and aren't about to commit a crime?”

“Believe it or not, it's the truth,” Jason clenches his jaw because for once he's actually telling the truth. And shit, it's not like Jay should really care about this kid's opinion of him anyway. He's out of the superhero lifestyle, and anyway he was only even out here because—

“Where's the girl,” he asks suddenly, remembering the whole reason he dragged himself into this mess in the first place.

“Saw her run off when her body guards came to help that guy,” the kid motions to Gleb, who'd given up trying to escape from his net prison-thing and was now attempting to crawl away.

Well. At least something good came out of this complete disaster of a night. 

“And the shipment?” he can't help asking, watches the weird tick in the kid's shoulders at that.

“What shipment?”

“Wouldn't know.” Jason shrugs. “Someone mentioned a shipment earlier, is all.”

A weird kaleidoscope of emotions crosses the kid's face, settles on something like annoyance before he turns away.

“There was a van,” he says, and takes off deeper into the alleyway. “Shit.”

Jason follows after him against his will, holds his breath when he runs through the slowly dissipating cloud of knock-out gas (he's actually really proud of that particular concoction. Starts out as a really potent tear gas and decays into a knock-out gas if it's not used in a properly ventilated area). 

The other end of the alley, when they reach it, opens out into a surprisingly busy street. If there had been a van here, it's long disappeared into the traffic by now. It's actually pretty well-lit and noisy, much to Jason's surprise. A typical Tuesday evening in New York City. 

The sinking feeling in his stomach says he'd been expecting the lonely, dank slums of Gotham instead. He doesn't quite know what to do with this weird ache in his gut. 

“Guess I'm making a trip to the docks,” the kid says, flexes the fingers of his metal arm so it reconfigures into something vaguely crossbow shaped.

Jason's not sure if that's cool or weird. Definitely convenient, he guesses.

“I'm Arsenal, by the way,” the kid says after a moment.

“No shit,” Jay says. He'd been expecting something cheesy to match Oliver Queen's gig. “I was betting on Red Arrow. Then again, he'd be older now, I guess.”

Jason only vaguely remembers Red Arrow. He'd been Dick's problem mostly, obsessed over finding a dead guy. Never knew him very well, and he never really cared to find out about the guy. Jay thinks this kid looks a little like him, a good seven years younger maybe, but there's a resemblance. Arsenal's back goes rigid, the metal arm quivering, shifting shape but never rematerializing into anything threatening. Apparently, Jay hit a nerve.

“Fuck off,” he finally snaps. “If you want Red Arrow, look up the Justice League.”

He can't help it; Jay lets out a surprised bark of laughter.

“Believe me, there is nothing on this fucking planet that would make me want to find that walking train wreck,” Jason says. “Besides, whatever he's shooting, I bet it's got nothing on that.”

Jason gestures grandly at Aresnal's entire person. His left arm, the flesh one, comes up to grasp himself on the elbow. His eyes drop to the floor. Jay's betting this kid does not know how to take a compliment.

“Look,” Arsenal says after long enough that the silence has become awkward again. “I'm heading to the Bay. There's a chance I can maybe still get Kozlov and more of his guys. If you're coming, stay quiet and try to keep up.” 

_I'd like to see you keep up with me,_ is on the tip of his tongue, but Jay swallows it back. He's done enough honesty tonight. Instead, what comes out of his mouth is “I'm no hero.”

“Fine,” Arsenal snaps back. “I don't need help anyway.”

With that, he fires a grappling hook into the sky and swings away. Jason stands there for a long time afterward, tries not to think about how often he's said those exact words and really meant the opposite. But he's _not_ a hero, not anymore, and he can't go around fighting crime when he's supposed to stay invisible. 

Not now. Not when he's got the ghosts of his past looking for him.

“Goddamit,” he sighs, and takes off towards the docks.

He does make a quick detour to that shitty apartment he'd found earlier, only to switch out his leather jacket for his threadbare hoodie—less protection, but the hood will give him throw more shadows on his face, even if the red color will probably stand out. He spends a couple of minutes pacing the length of the room in darkness, indecisive, but eventually he thinks _fuck it_ and slips out through the window again.

Two-thirds of the way into November, nowhere near Halloween anymore, and he catches a break. When he's vaulting over rooftops he spots a battered skull mask hiding by a dumpster. A couple of large cracks run down the top of the thing, forming a somewhat lopsided X down through the right eye, but it'll keep anyone else from getting a good look at his face, and Jay needs all the anonymity he can get if he's really going to do this again. 

It's dark by the time Jay makes it to the bay, and a wind has picked up. Still, from his vantage point on a nearby roof, he spots a suspicious-looking group of people milling around a dock: he thinks whoever Arsenal's been chasing have probably paid off some cops, because the area is deserted but for them. 

It's almost painfully cliché, really. 

Because Jason has been spending a lot of time lately with people who would like to kill him just to prove they can, he notices immediately when someone comes up behind him. He tenses in anticipation of a fight, only—

“Look who's suited up,” Arsenal says, low enough that the sound hardly travels. “I thought you weren't gonna play a hero.”

“Doesn't mean I don't know how,” Jason bites back. He taps the corner of his plastic mask, aggressively forces away the wistful feeling in his gut. It's too big to be his Robin mask; he doesn't _want_ it to be his Robin mask (it's not even his anymore anyway).

Arsenal lets out a rush of air, maybe in disbelief, maybe in annoyance, then jerks his head to the right, where a sleek black sedan has pulled up next to the huddle of drug-dealers. 

“What's the plan, then?”

“The plan is: bash some skulls, hogtie Kozlov, try not to die.”

That is—a surprisingly shitty plan. 

“Sounds good to me,” Jason says, and smirks to himself when Arsenal turns an incredulous look his way. Jay wonders if the kid's worked on a team before, if he's used to people shooting down his ideas. Instead of asking though, he just says, “Watch your 3, I've got the bastards by the water.”

He doesn't wait for a response, just climbs down the side of the building as quickly and unobtrusively as he can. A grappling hook gets fired, so quiet you'd only hear it if you were really looking for it, so Jay guesses the kid took his advice. 

Arsenal blasts into the thicket of the crowd like he's never heard of the word subtly, and Jay rolls his eyes, but uses the distraction to take down a handful of hired thugs easily.

And from there, things go pretty fucking smoothly, considering. The bad guys get dropped, nobody dies, some crusty old dude (probably Kozlov) does indeed get hogtied, and Jason contemplates setting their boat on fire when he discovers the sheer amount of drugs stored in there. At the last minute, he thinks _fuck it_ , and goes about rigging up the quickest, most unstable bomb he can.

He's been really good tonight. He deserves to treat himself. And if he doesn't physically light the place up himself, it's not really his crime is it? The fact that a box tumbling over could probably set the thing off isn't his problem. 

Jason slips out easily, finds Arsenal about five minutes later, circling Kozlov like he's some kind of vulture.

“We could call the cops?” Jay supplies when Arsenal doesn't speak.

“Wouldn't come,” is the reply. “Not unless there was an actual emergency. Kozlov pretty much owns this neighborhood.”

“We could blow something up?” Jay suggests next, because wouldn't it be extremely useful and convenient that he set that bomb up if that were the case?

Arsenal doesn't answer. What he does instead is reshape his metal arm into a—is that a rocket launcher? It is. Kid has a _rocket launcher_ in his arm—and lets off a shot straight into the ship.

The ship explodes into a giant bonfire, and Jason decides then and there that he likes this kid.

“If that doesn't bring the cops, it might just bring the League,” Arsenal says, a little too casually to be actually casual. 

And if it doesn't bring the Justice League, it might just bring the league's pet project.

“Right. I'm just gonna.”

He jerks his thumb over his shoulder, means _get outta your hair_ and also, probably, _fuck off permanently this time_. Arsenal scowls down at Kozlov for a while.

“Still not going to tell me who you are?”

“Already did,” Jay says, starts backing away lightly on his heels. “I'm nobody.” 

The firelight casts long shadows around them, bathes Arsenal's face in light, then darkness. Light again. He smiles, bares his teeth while he does it. Jason gets the feeling the kid doesn't smile too often.

(That would make two of them).

“Yeah, right. If you're Nobody, then I'm a freaking cyclops.”

“And the meta's read _The Odyssey_!” Jason can't help but exclaim. It's that, more than anything, that makes Jay hesitate again. “Look. Just. Call me whatever you want, okay? You won't be seeing me again.”

“If you think so,” Arsenal says. He taps his forehead just above his right eyebrow. “X.”

Jason mirrors the movement, feels the crack on his skull mask, the lopsided X. He pulls down the hood of his jacket and smiles, even though it wouldn't be seen. For a second, it's eerily quiet, but then Jason hears the tell-tale sound of a zeta tube powering up somewhere, and he's got to scram.

“Stay out of trouble, Arsenal.”

“You too, X.”

Jason fucks off, but he feels lighter than he has in weeks, and when he somersaults his way over to the next rooftop, he thinks maybe going out tonight wasn't such a shitty decision.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Dick is not Roy Harper (probably).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is later than I was expecting. Dick was being so DIFFICULT >.

**Düsseldorf, Germany – 14 November – 8:45pm**

The trail goes cold. Which isn't exactly surprising, considering what they've found out so far. A man meeting Jason's description has apparently been running with Egon's crew for weeks now. 

“Quiet kind of kid; kept to himself,” a nameless thug says, hanging upside-down from one of Babs' grappling lines. “If he's in some kinda trouble, I swear, I had nothing to do with it!”

“Called him Red,” another says. “Cuz a his hoodie? I heard he was _paying_ Egon so he could shadow him for a while. Quick way to get himself killed, if you ask me.”

“I'll say one thing about him, that son of a bitch could fight,” their eighth lead says. “Took down one of my best men in under a minute. Egon liked to sick him on my men when he got bored. You find that piece of trash, you tell him I'm looking for him.”

(That last one was an undercover intel-mission, and if Dick hadn't been pretending to be some hired help himself, he probably would have punched the guy in the jaw.)

Dick was right about that blizzard; it sweeps through the south-western tip of Germany their first night in, leaving a thick blanket of snow over Dusseldorf. This close to the Rhine, Dick can see the clock tower overlooking the riverbank, a bright beacon that looks almost picturesque with the city lights twinkling around it. 

He lets himself enjoy the sight for a little, thinks that he may come back here one day to visit, when he's less—whatever he is right now. The team split up two days ago, before Dick really started looking through Dusseldorf, and he regrets it a little, now. But they don't really have the time to take a mini-vacation, not with the ghost of Jason Todd hanging over their shoulders. It's part of the reason why they split up, Dick thinks. With Batgirl chasing a lead out in Berlin and Tim checking out the coast, none of them have much time to sit down and examine their feelings on this. 

“DNA results from B,” Tim says in his ear. 

“Good news?” Babs asks.

“Negative.” There's a small rush of air along the comm line, like Tim's sighing. “No DNA except for Egon's. Preliminary results show poison in his system. B says he recognized the concoction, that it would have come from a specialized assassin out in Austria.”

“Do we have any theories yet?” Barbara asks after a long pause.

“Other than Jason apparently going rogue on us?”

“We are not assuming that,” Dick says. “Not until we've exhausted all other possibilities.”

“It is the most likely explanation, Nightwing,” Barbara says. “I'm sorry, but we may have to—”

“Jason going rogue still wouldn't explain how he's alive at all in the first place,” Dick cuts in. 

“But it would explain why he hasn't come home,” Tim says cautiously. 

Dick sighs, turns his back on the Rhine river and closes his eyes. _What have you gotten yourself into, Little Wing?_ He wishes—well, he wishes a lot of things. But that won't change the situation they're facing now.

“I think we should meet back up in Gotham,” Dick finally says. “I've found out all I can here.”

“Me too,” Tim responds. “Batgirl?”

The line is silent for a long while before Babs answers.

“I—I have a lead that'll take me farther Southeast.”

“How far Southeast?”

Silence again.

“Batgirl?” Tim tries.

“Uzbekistan,” she finally relents.

“I want daily check-ins while you're abroad,” Tim says, and Dick thinks Robin manages to conceal his surprise pretty well. 

He feels a little curl of pride in his stomach for a second, because Tim is a good leader, despite the kid's own misgivings. Too bad the kid is a few hundred miles away; Dick would give him a hug if he were around. He mentally writes out an I.O.U. (one hug, extra snuggly) for the next time he sees Robin.

“--quickest ETA to Gotham, Nightwing?”

“Two hours tops, if I find that Zeta tube,” Dick says, obviously having missed a large chunk of conversation. “Yours?”

“Anywhere from five to ten,” Tim admits. “I'm nowhere near a Zeta, or an airport.”

“You could try catching a cruise ship, if you were feeling adventurous, Robin,” Barbara says, and Dick can practically hear the smirk in her voice.

“Yeah, if I wanted to waste a week out at sea.”

“Could be fun,” Dick hedges as he hops down from his perch and into the snow. “You could sneak onto a cargo ship, hide out in the lower decks, chat up some lovely ne'er do wells.”

“Oh my God, did you really just say 'ne'er do well'?” Tim sounds vaguely scandalized, and it makes Dick laugh to himself. 

“Hey! You guys love my grasp of the English language!”

“This from the guy who coined the word Astrous.”

“Babs, you said you thought it was cute!”

“That was when we were dating, Dick,” Barbara says, and now she's definitely laughing at him. 

Dick pouts. He hopes Batgirl and Robin can feel his disapproval over their com-line. If they can, they ignore him in favor of laughing some more. 

“I'll meet you at the cave then, Nightwing?” Tim says after a second.

“Sure thing, Robin. Be careful, Batgirl.”

“Always am. Batgirl out.”

“See you soon,” Tim says. “Robin over and out.”

 

Turns out to take Dick just under 90 minutes to reach the outskirts of Düsseldorf and find their hidden Zeta tube. Four to ten hours, Tim had said, so instead of the Batcave, Dick goes to his apartment in Blüdhaven first, thinks about taking a shower, maybe catching a power-nap before Tim gets in. Maybe food? He can always use some spare calories, running around fighting crime the way he does.

The sun is only just thinking about setting, and it casts long shadows around Dick's neglected living room. The half-dead plant Zatanna had given him on their 6-month anniversary is wilting quietly by his window, and Dick is guilt-ed into giving it some water (it's a plant; it shouldn't be able to convey disapproval like that). Once he's done that, he still isn't quite sure what to do with himself. There's a jittery sort of restlessness that's beginning to take up residence under his skin, and he thinks that there has to be something he can do while Tim's en route home.

Eventually, he gives in and orders way too much take-out from his favorite Chinese place, curls up on his loveseat and starts pulling up all of Jason's old files on his wrist computer. Both his desktop and laptop are connected to the Batcave computers, true, but it's easier for Dick to make connections when he's got to physically pull the files from their spot in cyberspace—it's part of the reason why he originally designed the tech anyway. Kinesthetic learner, always has been. 

He combs through Bruce's latest reports: interrogations with the cemetery workers, weird hospital reports, bits and pieces of a story told through the eyes of Crime Alley. 

Bruce has been busy these last four days, not only with this but with a recent breakout of Blackwell prison. Even so, the picture these reports paints isn't pretty. 

Jason Todd's coffin had been broken into, long empty when Bruce'd had it exhumed. From the photos Bruce took, it looks like someone had broken _out of_ the thing, not into it. Which means—Dick doesn't want to think about what it would mean, honestly. It's all too easy for him to imagine Jason, too stubborn even in death, clawing his way out of his own grave. Dick's stomach twists at the thought.

He sifts through the information for hours, up until about ten months ago, when Jason seems to have disappeared. But what he still doesn't understand is how. He pulls up Jason's autopsy reports, stomachs the photos, holds his breath as he listens to the doctor's recordings on the cause of death (severe pulmonary contusion, most likely caused by primary blast injury). How is he alive now, when he was very, very dead three years ago?

A knock on his door startles Dick out of his musings. He hops up out of his seat, panics a little when he notices he never even bothered to change out of his Nightwing gear, and is just about to grab the bathrobe he'd hastily slipped on to pay the take-out guy when a voice sounds from the other side of the door.

“Dick? You home?”

“Tim?” Dick opens the door, and yes, there's Tim in his favorite fleece sweater, sunglasses hiding his eyes. Dick watches one of his brothers' eyebrows climb out of hiding behind the glasses.

“You should probably change,” Tim says, the hint of a smile around the corners of his lips. “Considering it's still light out and everything.”

“I am still adjusting to living in anyplace that isn't a mouldy warehouse,” Dick answers, motions for Tim to come in before he saunters back over to his couch. “Did you check-in with B?”

“Told me I'd find you here.” Tim crosses to Dick's window, only big enough for a guy around Dick's size to squeeze through. He grips Dick's flimsy curtains, hesitates for a second, closes them. “He's looking into Cadmus.”

“So he thinks it's another clone?” 

Dick fiddles with his wrist computer, wishes for a second he had hard copies of his files. Nothing wastes time like straightening out a pile of photos. 

“He thinks it's best if we exhaust all our options before jumping to any conclusions.”

“So Bruce has already ruled out all the other supers who'd be able to pull off something like this?”

“Clayface is in Arkham,” Tim supplies, “and as far as I know, Bruce doesn't even want to call it a clone yet, until we get a DNA sample.”

'It sounds like Bruce is already writing this off,” Dick says, resists the urge to stand and pace. 

“You know how he gets.”

Tim's frowning a little, a small downturn at the lips that Dick's rarely seen before. Of all the batkids, Tim's always been the most serious, but this looks strange on him. Like wistfulness, or disappointment. Dick wonders then what this must be like for him. For someone who'd never even gotten to meet the second boy wonder before Gotham's worst had claimed him. Sure, Tim'd done the whole Stalk-The-Batman-From-Afar thing for almost a decade before he'd become Robin, but Dick isn't sure that can compare to the real thing. Compare to Jason Todd, who was brash, arrogant, utterly fearless, and a complete sap for Disney movies. 

“What do you think, Tim?” Dick asks then.

Tim sighs, pulls off his sunglasses and lays them carefully on the low-rising side table.

“I think we've all been grieving Jason for a long time,” Tim starts. “And none of us are thinking clearly about this, least of all Bruce. Which is why he wants to push this as far away from himself as he can.”

“So you think it was Cadmus too?”

“When the alternative is mysterious resurrection?” Tim asks, and waves his arms around a little. “Yes.”

“Stranger things have happened.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

Silence settles around them at that, Dick weighing how true Tim's statement is. On the one hand, alien invasions and brainwashed clones, both pretty unbelievable but easily explained, once they got the explanation. On the other, someone very obviously dead suddenly being not-so-dead? Not as much. Maybe they're just missing that very obvious explanation though? 

If dick weren't so distracted, he'd probably be siding with Tim here. If their positions were reversed Dick would warn Tim against jumping to conclusions. But this is Jason they're talking about, and if anyone was stubborn enough to screw Death over, it would have been Jason. 

“I'm glad B left you in charge of this one, Tim,” Dick finally says. “I can't think clearly on this.”

“So you think it really is Jason.”

“I have to, Tim. If there's any chance—”

“People don't just wake up in their graves,” Tim says, and he's using the special voice now, the one he uses on spooked pedestrians. Dick wonders what he sounds like to warrant that voice.

“But you've seen the coffin,” oh, there it is. He sounds small and vulnerable. No wonder Tim is looking worried now. “It just feels right to me, Tim.”

“I know you're under a lot of stress.” Tim crosses to the couch, hesitates for a second before sitting next to him. “But I just don't want you to get obsessed. Remember what happened to Roy?”

“And Roy found Speedy in the end!”

“Arsenal,” Tim corrects on reflex, then, “And he nearly destroyed his life in the process.”

“No one knows better about Roy's self-destruction than I do,” Dick says, mentally adds _except maybe Cheshire_ to the thought.

“I know.”

They're both quiet after that, Dick lost in memories. Roy's gaunt face, their short fling (the even shorter, explosively painful break-up), the way Roy was slowly slipping away from them, like he was determined to follow Speedy to the grave. But he _did_ find him. Dick understands now, a little, about that kind of complete inability to give up on that last shard of hope, no matter how painful it is to hold on to.

“So uh, what's our plan for tonight?”

“I was thinking you could do some leg work,” Tim replies quickly, probably just as eager as Dick to redirect the conversation. “I wanted to review some eyewitness accounts.”

“Right,” Dick says. He runs a hand through his hair. “I wanted to talk with those hospital workers anyway.”

“Okay.” Tim stands, points vaguely to the door. “I'm heading to the cave.”

“Radio me if you find anything.”

“I will. And don't forget to change!” Tim adds as he leaves. 

Dick laughs a little, watches Tim round the corner to the stairwell before he closes the door again. He gives himself a minute to think about what Tim said, to poke at the idea that maybe Jason isn't really back. He blinks back tears, breathes in deep to keep away that crushing feeling in his chest. But Dick's pretty optimistic; it's part of the reason him and Bruce have butted heads in the past. He's got to believe his gut instinct; it's never steered him wrong before. 

So he goes to change. After all, he's got a couple of doctors to interrogate.

 

One week and three days later, they're nowhere closer to solving this mystery than they were. Babs has been on radio silence for the last three days, and Tim was recalled to the Team undercover operation. Meanwhile Dick is trying to reconcile the person they met in Germany (from varying sources: mouthy, cocky, assassin-in-training) to the boy who may have clawed his way out of his own grave three years ago (silent, unresponsive, beat the shit out of you when provoked, sometimes shared food with the other kids). Something happened in the interim that Dick's determined to find out. 

Bruce is with the Justice League off-planet, because apparently intergalactic peace is more important than their current mission, which has left Dick looking over Gotham for the night. He doesn't really mind, not if he ignores the tiny part of his brain that had wanted to take a leave of absence from superheroing after Wally's death and before this Jason mess.

At about four in the morning, Dick makes one final sweep of the city and decides to head back to the cave. He's exhausted, both from regular crime-fighting and an unexpected run-in with Harley Quinn in the East Quarter. All he really wants to do is take a hot shower, eat roughly a thousand calories of food, and collapse into bed (not necessarily in that order). 

He gets as far as rinsing out his hair when it hits him: November 24. Jason died three years ago today. He braces himself against the shower wall, hands on either side of the shower head, and breathes harshly. Bruce is _off planet_ ; there's no way he's going to make it to Jason's grave this year. After a full minute, he shuts off the water dries off as quickly as he can, and pulls on some of his warmer sweaters. 

Almost as an afterthought, he grabs his keys and rushes out the cave's less conspicuous exit, hoping no one will recognize Nightwing's motorcycle is being driven by a probably crazy-looking civilian at the crack of dawn. 

He could've probably waited a few hours, gone to visit in the daylight and after maybe four hours of sleep, but something's roiling heavily in Dick's stomach. It feels like he _needs_ to get there now, before it's too late.

Whatever “it” is.

Luckily the grave site isn't too far when you're breaking every speed limit in Gotham, and in under ten minutes, Dick's pulling up to the cemetery. The sky is turning a dark navy blue, just enough light to pick his way across the grave yard, despite the weak light of the crescent moon. There's also a brittle wind blowing in from the east. Not enough cloud-cover for the possibility of snow, but certainly cold enough for it. 

_Here lies Jason Todd,_ the marker reads, _Friend and Ally_.

“We should have buried you on the manor grounds,” Dick tells the grave quietly. “That way, when whatever happened to you happened, we probably would have known.” 

Dick feels a little awkward all of a sudden, because what do you tell the grave of your sort-of brother, when you know the grave is currently empty and have reason to believe its former occupant is walking around somewhere?

“Guess I didn't really think this through,” Dick mutters sheepishly. “But Bruce can't be here today, and he never misses the anniversary if he can help it. I probably should have brought flowers, but. I left in kind of a rush.”

He stands there awkwardly for a few more minutes in silence, resists the urge to sit down beside the stone and talk about his day. He's done it so often in the past that standing here almost makes him feel like a stranger. But it's different now, knowing that Jason isn't in that grave.

“I miss you, Little Wing,” Dick whispers, surprises himself by how rough his voice sounds. “And even if no one else believes it, I know you're alive somewhere, and I'll—”

But he stops himself, listens. He thought he'd heard faint footsteps, the crush of withering leaves on the hard cemetery ground. He makes a full circle and yes, about 80 yards away, the shape of a man quickly walking away. 

“Hey!” Dick calls on impulse, and like he'd been waiting for his cue, the figure takes off in a sprint. Dick chases after the person, ignores the way his muscles scream in protest. “Hey! Wait!” he calls again, but the man doesn't slow down. Dick chases him up to the main road, where on a wild, impossible instinct, he screams out “Jason!”

And—the guy just stops, on the other side of the road. His back is still to Dick, but hell, when Dick finally reaches the road, he practically wants to fly those last few yards and tackle him to the ground. But the wide strip of pavement separating them feels like a giant, gaping canyon, and Dick's rooted to his spot. He sees the other man's (Jason's?) shoulders rise and fall, like he's taking a deep breath. Then slowly, slowly, he pivots on the balls of his feet and faces Dick. 

It's just like that night in Germany all over again. The corner of Jason's lips twitch up, and he pulls off the hood of his battered-looking sweater (thinks of those thugs, _we called him red, cuz a his hoodie_ ), and in the thin grey-blue light of predawn, Jason Todd brings up a hand and waves at him like—like.

“Jay,” Dick whispers, just under his breath. 

He takes a step forward, then a couple back when some cars shoot by. There are thousands of questions Dick knows he should ask; he should probably convince Jason to come with him to the batcave, to make sure he's not actually a clone, or cybernetic robot, or shape-shifting villain. But Dick just. He just stands there, staring like some kind of shell-shocked civilian. 

“Jason,” Dick tries again, louder this time, so it carries. Jason inexplicably puts a finger up to his mouth.

“That's a secret, Dickie,” Jason calls out, and he grins in that way Dick'd thought he'd never get to see again. 

Just then an 18-wheeler thunders by, and when it clears them, Jason's gone with it.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jason's terrible horrible, no good, very bad weekend

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! So um this chapter is relatively short, and I kind of didn't want to post it because it feels like a fluff-sort of chapter. New characters but spoilers for the end of the chapter so i'm not gonna put them in the tags yet. Also remember the thing about not wanting a long, ridiculous series? OH WELL. /cries

The problem with coming back to the states, Jason reflects one night sitting along the rooftop of his temporary homestead, is that he's not constantly surrounded by generally awful people. Don’t get him wrong. There are a lot of really awful people here in New York, but the difference is that he’s not sleeping in the same crummy shack with them, not making forced conversation while moving heavy crates of drugs for hours. Which, ordinarily, would be a good thing, but now that's making it harder for Jason to keep a firm grasp on the cold pit of revenge that used to writhe around in his stomach.

He tosses his mask up into the air, watches it spin lazily before catching it again. Wishes vaguely for a cigarette.

Atmosphere, apparently, is very important to maintaining a nearly insane-with-rage mood. Who fucking knew?

Not even a month ago, he’d been so sure of what he was supposed to do. Batman rules on fear, but the ones who aren’t afraid need to disappear. It was clear as fucking day, and it’s not like he regrets killing everyone Egon ever sold to and blowing up his base; _he doesn’t_. Not really, anyway. They were selling _children_ ; people like that don’t get the good fucking grace to rot in jail. 

But out here, in the cool, quiet night of New York City, the impotent rage he’d felt in Germany is almost completely dispersed. Even the thought of being replaced isn’t as painful as it normally is. 

Jason stands then, pulls the mask on roughly, and hops off the rooftop to the nearest fire escape. There’s something growing in the pit of his stomach, and it feels a lot like acceptance. He fucking hates it.

Not fifteen minutes later he finds a couple of muggers to beat up, and he feels a little bit better. He’s been good for the past eight days now; hasn’t given in to the temptation to slink around the Big Apple in his kiddie mask at all. He’s been using all that free time to catch up on everything that’s happened in the world since his re-training (which, _what the fuck_ he leaves the country for 21 months and fucking aliens threaten the whole damn world?). Besides, there’s a lot of cloud cover out tonight, like maybe winter finally decided to show up. Jason thinks that by the end of the week, the city will be covered in snow; that kind of cloud-cover means low visibility. 

Besides, he figures he deserves the treat. Anything to get rid of the restless itchy feeling that’s trapped itself in his chest. Un-fucking-fortunately it’s Jason Cannot Catch a Break Day, and no sooner than he’s elbowed the last asshole in the face that a familiar shadow creeps up to him.

“I thought this wasn’t really your scene?” Arsenal says. He’s got his arms crossed over his chest, a tiny smirk on the corner of his mouth.

“Fuck off,” Jay snaps, but there’s no real heat to it. “Isn’t there anything more disastrous that needs fixing around here? New York’s a pretty big city.”

“Nothing The Team can’t handle.”

The kid sounds a little bitter about that, but Jason can’t really focus on anything except for the way his stomach drops about ten feet. One thing he really doesn’t want to deal with is the possibility of seeing someone who might recognize him. It’s true he wasn’t a Team member for very long, but if Miss Martian is around…and Jason’s here fighting crime like some kind of vigilante because he’d gotten antsy.

“Didn’t think they did the whole patrolling-the-night-for-petty-crime thing,” Jason says, trying to keep his voice light.

“Didn’t think you’d know who they were,” Arsenal shoots back, narrowing his eyes as he says it. Jason expects the kid to start probing him with questions, but instead he just shakes his head once, runs a hand over the top of his shorn hair. “Look,” he says, “I don’t care who you are or why you’re not in the superhero game anymore. But if you don’t want to get stopped by the wonder team I’d suggest locking yourself up indoors and avoiding even sneezing too loudly. From what I’ve heard, they’re looking for somebody, and if it’s you—”

“It’s not,” Jason says. There’s no way Batman would let the team help with something so obviously his problem. Good old Daddy Bats was never good with sharing his problems. “I already told you, I’m nobody. Nobody special.”

“So you’ve said,” Arsenal says. 

Jason can’t help but roll his eyes and salute the kid, before he takes off down the closest alleyway. 

“See you around,” Jason calls over his shoulder, and hears a faint huff of air that just might have been a laugh.

After a moment, he pulls off his mask and tucks it into one of the pockets of his hoodie, figuring that he’ll blend into the city nightlife more as a punk teenager than as a masked crazy person, plus, the cold night air feels nice across his face. One thing about wearing a mask, you get used to breathing in your stuffy, recycled breath. It’ll probably be refreshing to go without it.

He stops for just a second, takes a deep breath of the crisp night air, thinks about maybe looping back to Broadway Avenue to get lost in the perpetual crowd there. As luck would have it, that’s when a small green rat scurries by, freezes, and openly stares at him.

“Jason?” it says bizarrely.

“Uh, do I know you?” Jason asks the rat, which blinks at him, smiles widely (Jason didn’t know rats could smile), and transforms into—“Holy shit. Gar?”

He has less than a split second to brace himself before a vaguely simian-shaped and still very green Gar Logan throws himself at Jason and wraps himself around Jason’s middle.

“How are you—we all thought you were—what are you doing here?!? Jeez you’ve gotten huge!” is what Jason can interpret from the muffled sounds Gar makes with his head mashed up to Jason’s chest.

He pats Gar on the head a little awkwardly, tries to decide if that’s panic or happiness floating around in his chest. Probably a little of both. 

“And you’re way more green than I remember,” Jason finally manages to say. Stares openly. Then, thoughtfully, adds, “And hairy.”

Gar laughs brightly and detaches himself from Jason’s person. He’s still smiling hugely up at Jason, and it’s throwing him for a loop. He’d never thought anyone would be that happy to see him. 

“I manifested some powers about a year back,” he says, striking a pose with his chest puffed out and his hands on his hips. “Since I’d already been training with Miss Martian for like, ever, they basically begged me to join the team.”

“I’m sure that’s how it went,” Jason says dubiously, and after a second, Gar drops the pose and rubs the back of his head.

“More or less,” Gar says. His grin disappears for all of three seconds before he snaps his fingers. “But dude! You’re! We all thought, after the thing with the Joker…”

“Yeah,” Jason says. Before he can think better of it, he mutters “I—uh. I got better.”

That makes Gar laugh again, and he stretches his arms out in front of him, fingers splayed.

“Jason Todd, Defeater of Death,” he says, “I like it. Got a great ring to it. Just wait until the others—”

“No. You can’t tell anyone, Gar,” Jason says suddenly, and that’s definitely panic overwhelming him, maybe mixed in with a little anger. “Not Miss Martian, not Nightwing, not—”

“But Robin—”

 _“Don’t say that name to me,”_ Jason bites out, and surprises himself with how dangerous it sounds. Gar’s smile fades away, gets replaced by something that might be confusion, or concern, or maybe even just pity. 

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Never said I was,” Jason answers. He shakes his head. “Look. I’m—fine. I’m just cleaning up some loose ends. Nobody knows I’m back, and it needs to stay that way. You can’t tell anyone you’ve seen me, Gar. Okay?”

“Okay,” Gar says slowly, still frowning a little. “I promise. But if you’re really in trouble, you can come to us. You know? No one’ll care what happened; they’d all just be glad you’re back.”

“You obviously don’t know Batman so well,” Jason says bitterly.

“I don’t mean Batman, dummy,” Gar says with a roll of his eyes. The smile is, infuriatingly, back in place. “I meant the team! We’re family, Jason. We miss you.”

“Sure, which is why I got replaced.” When Gar looks ready to argue that point, Jason holds up a hand. “I can’t stay, Gar. It was nice to see you again. Please don’t follow me.”

Jason turns tail and basically bolts down the way he’d come, adrenaline pounding in his ears. He should have just fucking stayed on his rooftop and smoked a packet of cigarettes or something. But no, he had to go out and fight crime like some kind of—

He isn’t a hero anymore. He has to remember that. 

He takes a few short cuts and a sewer route, and before he knows it, he’s out on the bank of the Hudson. This close to the river, Jason can make out a smokestack or two around the twinkling city lights. It’s almost picturesque. 

Jason crouches in the shadows of some rubble and thinks. He’s pretty sure Gar won’t tell anyone about what just happened (the kid was always particular about keeping his promises), but at the same time, he’s not entirely sure the kid won’t follow him. One thing’s for sure, at least, with both Arsenal and the Team skulking around New York, he can’t stay here. 

So, the plan is: fuck off for a couple of days, do not be seen by anyone else who might recognize him, come back for his guns and maybe start city-hopping. 

His first stop, against all common sense, is his own grave. And the thing is—he hasn’t been paying careful attention to the date, necessarily. Back in Germany, one of Egon’s men had celebrated his birthday on the fifth, so he at least knows it’s November, and with the boat ride back to the states it’s. Well. 

It’s around that time of year, isn’t it?

There are lots of options for getting where he needs to go, but the easiest and least suspicious would be a train ride. So he hops on an empty cargo that looks to be slithering down in the right direction, finds the warmest, softest patch of floor, and tries to catch a few hours of sleep. He’s somewhat successful, in that he drifts in and out of dreamless sleep for the next five hours, and tries really hard not to question his motives for going back home. It’s a long train down to the other end of Gotham city from New York, so that by the time he’s outside the cemetery gates, the sun is high in the sky and a few older folks are milling about. 

No one pays him any mind as he stalks up and down the headstones; Jason figures they’re all too wrapped up in their own personal griefs to notice him too much. Which is good, he thinks, considering he’s completely unprepared for the sight of someone standing by his graveside. Jason’s far enough away that he can duck behind an old, gnarled tree easily. He watches the figure from about 30 yards away, but there’s no mistaking that perfect posture, the crisp black suit, the way his hair catches the afternoon light in spontaneous bursts of silver.

Alfred’s come to visit him. One of his hands curls up into a fist against the tree bark, and he has to remind himself that he can’t just walk up to Alfred and hug him right now. But _damn_ , he wants to. Jason watches the straight, unmoving line of Alfred’s back for almost fifteen minutes before the man stoops and gently places something on the ground. Then, less than a minute later, he departs, somewhat slower than what Jason remembers. Jason waits another ten minutes before he risks approaching the gravesite. 

The ground’s been newly overturned, which tells him right away that Bruce has to have had his coffin exhumed. He wonders if that’s why Bruce isn’t with Alfred today; wonders why it matters so much to him. His grave marker is simple, relatively small compared to the elaborate marble statues standing guard over some other graves. _Here lies Jason Todd_ it reads. _Friend and Ally._

The bronze embossed lettering is a little green in places from the elements, but carefully taken care of. Beside the marker is a sealed envelope that simply says “For Jason” in Alfred’s neat, precise handwriting. He hesitates a second, because the grave was exhumed and they must have found that old, broken coffin. There’s no way Bruce could hide that from Alfred, and whatever is in this envelope could be all an elaborate round of psychological warfare, courtesy of Bruce Wayne. 

“Fuck it,” he whispers to himself, and tears open the envelope with more force than probably necessary. 

A single, glossy 4x6 flutters to the ground. He picks it up, wipes off some of the dirt and—

And it’s a snapshot of Jason himself, fourteen years old, his nose red with the beginnings of what would turn into a miserable summer cold, snuggled in close to Bruce’s side with Dick’s head and most of his upper body sprawled across Jason’s lap. They’re all asleep, except for Dick, who has one eye half-open and a sleepy smile on his face. The memory of that night hits him like a freight train, all his breath leaving him in an instant. 

He never knew Alfred’d taken this picture. Bruce probably doesn’t know about it either, considering the warm contentment he’s practically radiating in the snapshot. Jason turns the picture over, blinking rapidly to clear his mysteriously blurry eyesight. On the back: more of Alfred’s calm-looking calligraphy.

_Come home, Master Jason._

There’s a hollow ringing in his ears now, like he can practically hear Alfred’s soothing voice repeating the words in his head. He has the sudden, wild urge to rip the picture into tiny pieces, but instead he rubs his thumb along Dick’s stupid smile and carefully tucks the photo away in one of his many pockets. 

He doesn’t know what the fuck possesses him to hang around the gravesite, but he does. The rest of the afternoon and all fucking night; he skulks around the place, doesn’t get more than 100 yards from his own grave. 

That is, until Dick shows up. 

Jason could recognize him anywhere, even in the hazy, pre-dawn light that casts strange shadows across his face. The man is a beacon of energy, and the way he practically bolts to Jason’s headstone makes him think Dick could’ve been trying to outrun an explosion. 

He stands at Jason’s grave for a long while, and Jason—well. He’s never been able to resist Dick, has he? He sneaks up as close as he dares to get, just close enough to hear the tail end of Dick’s running monologue.

“I miss you, Little Wing,” Dick says, and it’s that stupid fucking nickname Dick’d given him so many years ago that makes Jason—

It does something to him, rips open a wound he thinks had healed. Jason realizes then that he should never have come back. He should have hidden out in Siberia maybe, anywhere that would have kept him away from Dick fucking Grayson, the bright beautiful smile Jay’d tried so hard to forget about while training himself to become a killer. He turns tail and walks off, as quietly as he can.

Not quietly enough for Dick, apparently, because Jason’s no sooner reached an old, wizened elm that he hears Dick call after him. Panic hits Jason’s system the way it hasn’t since he’d found himself bound and gagged in a shitty warehouse, and he books it. Dick’s hot on his trail though, and as he crosses the long, dangerous access road, Jay thinks he might just get away. That is, until Dick calls out Jason’s name.

And that, well. Jason can’t ignore Dick when he sounds like that. So he stops short, takes a couple of steadying breaths, and turns around.

Dick looks. He looks kind of like shit, honestly. Like he’s been up all night and was on the wrong end of a fist fight. His sweater is on inside-out. But his eyes are about the size of saucers, and there’s this endearingly stupid gobsmacked expression on his face. For the first time in a long while, he feels like crossing the road and just saying hi like a regular human being, and not running away. 

That feeling lasts all of a couple of seconds, however, because a semi just so happens to thunder by. Jason moves all on instinct, leaps onto a space about half a foot wide and clings to the side for all that he’s worth. 

All in all, he thinks as the semi takes a sharp turn that nearly turns him into road kill, the night could have gone better.

*  
*  
*

**Peskm Mountain Range – Uzbekistan – 26 November – 04:11pm**

Babs guesses that she’s got about an hour left of sunlight on the mountainside, and she frowns to herself, shakes some snow off of her cowl and ignores the little voice in her head telling her she should go back. Her communicator stopped working about two weeks ago, once she entered the national park, and she’d be feeling guilty about leaving Nightwing and Robin in the dark if she weren’t so sure she’s on the right track. 

Okay, so she’s maybe feeling a little bit guilty about that. She’s not even out here looking for Jason; she’d heard on their investigations that Jason had been seen in and around the company of Talia al-Ghul, and Babs figured she could hit at least a handful of birds with the same stone. If Jason is somehow, miraculously, alive, Talia might know how to get in contact with him. She might also know where Ra’s ended up. This whole Jason fiasco might have driven everything else from Dick’s mind, but Barbara still remembers the terrified, desperate look on Ra’s al Ghul’s face as he was carried away during their big firefight, still feels the anxiety pooling in her stomach in knowing most of The Light got away. 

She’s heard a couple of myths about a family of dragons that live out here, a few whispered confessions about a league of assassins who serve them deep in the heart of the mountains, of a master who cannot die. So she thought she’d snoop around a bit, see if her leads out here came to fruition, but no such luck. It’s been weeks and all Babs has to show for it is a case of chilblains on her toes from wearing the wrong boots the first night in the mountains.

She’s about to turn back and head for her camp site (not much, but better than wandering around in the dark in the snow again), when something catches her eye. Night is falling fast, so the strong golden sunlight throws everything into sharp relief around her, but something about 500 meters away is what could be the mouth of a cave. The flickering quality of light tells her that if it’s a cave, it’s got a fire, and when there’s fire, there’s sure to be people. She hesitates a little before making up her mind and heading for the cave. Half a kilometer in this terrain could be an eternity, but she’s come this far for answers; it only makes sense to follow her curiosity. 

It’s a pretty long walk, and the snow starts up again in a flurry just as the last rays of sunlight vanish behind the mountain. Babs isn’t ashamed to say she’s relieved when she finally reaches the little cave, but when she crawls inside (she has to stoop a little to make it in), she’s not entirely sure she isn’t hallucinating. There is a roaring fire along the very back wall of the cave, right where a gap in the rocks lets out the smoke, and huddled on the other side are two kids. A little boy who looks sound asleep, wrapped in a thick wool blanket, and a little girl, sitting cross-legged by the boy’s head, her hands resting gently on the ground beside her and eyes trained on Barbara. She looks to be about seven, with sharp features and short, lank hair. She doesn’t smile, and she hardly blinks as she stares Babs down.

“Hi,” Barbara says quietly, looking between the two and managing a small smile. “Are you guys lost?”

The girl doesn’t answer, but she does reach out to gently shake the boy awake, her eyes never leaving Barbara. The boy blinks a couple of times, then his eyes land on Babs and he frowns.

“هل والدتى حاجة الى؟” he says, sitting up and letting the blanket slip from his shoulders. He’s tiny, can’t be more than five or six, but there’s something about him that’s vaguely familiar.

“I’m sorry,” Babs says, and curses every time she scoffed at Bruce’s language lessons. She’s fluent in five languages and can get by in three more, but damn if she ever paid attention in her Arabic class. “Do you speak any English?”

“Why are you here?” the boy says in nearly perfect English. “Did my mother send you here?”

He turns to the little girl who finally looks away from Babs. Something unspoken passes between them before the little girl shakes her head slowly. 

“Who is your mother?” Babs asks after an interminable silence. She gets nothing in response, and right now Babs is trying really hard not to think about every corny horror movie Dick dragged her to that involved creepy kids in the middle of a mountain. “Do you kids need help?”

The little boy scowls and scrambles up, puts his little hands on his hips. The firelight glints off his eyes, and that’s when Babs places him: he’s got Bruce Wayne’s eyes.

“My name is Damian al Ghul,” he says. “I am the heir to the League of Shadows, and I do not require your assistance. Please leave.”

Well then, Barbara thinks. This is sure to be a long night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope the Arabic was grammatically correct! I am only one year into my Arabic and so have very little idea about what I'm doing /o\ anyway it translates to "Does my mother need me?"


	5. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The cumbersome exposition sequence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey look, she lives!

**Three Years Ago**

Jason is fourteen and still not entirely sure if he's dreaming or not. Three-and-a-half weeks of living in Batman's—Bruce Wayne's—fucking _mansion_ (“Wayne Manor,” Alfred The Butler corrects, “and I would do with watching my language if I were you, Master Jason.”) like he's some kind of—some kind of _someone_. Not just a trashy street kid who got caught lifting the Batman's tires.

Which brings him back to probably dreaming. No way Batman saw a punk kid stealing from him and thought, _hey, let's take this kid home_ instead of where is my tear-gas and which way to the nearest prison cell?

And yet.

And yet, here Jason is, sitting cross-legged on a stuffy couch that probably cost more than Jason's old apartment cost his mom, with a thin blanket wrapped around his shoulders and staring blankly at the really ridiculously oversized flatscreen TV. He's thumbing through the channels listlessly, because while Bruce's away at work (boring work, not crime-fighting), Jason's left with nothing to do. Alfred's already banished him from the kitchen after the thing with the bagels—which was not Jason's fault, if only because that toaster is literally from the distant future—and since Alfred's the only other living being in the house, Jason's options are either be bored in his room or be bored somewhere else.

He's never had a TV before. He’s found out they’re pretty overrated.

Spring is just thinking about melting into summer, and “Wayne Manor” already has its refrigerated air systems going. So while anywhere else, Jason would probably be shedding layers and complaining about the weirdly sticky heat, right now he's feeling chilly. He wonders if it's all the air conditioning, and not the frigid attitude some of Bruce's friends have shown him.

There's this big hulking dude that comes around who has got to be, _got to be_ Superman, and he gives Jason the old stink-eye whenever he comes over, like he's afraid Jason might steal the fucking silverware while he's not looking. That's nothing though, compared to the annoying looks he's gotten from the hoity-toities who come knocking on Mr. Wayne's door.

But Jason's anger ran out after a week crashing in this place. After fourteen days he couldn't deny that he'd officially moved-in, so he figures he'll stop being pissed at living here and start pissing everyone else off who didn't. So far the plan is working swimmingly.

At around half-past four, the front doors bang open, and an explosion of sound and color storms into the house. Jason's abandoned the TV by then and started reading his old, battered copy of _Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban_ , so he doesn't look up until the pounding footsteps have stopped somewhere close by.

There's a kid standing there, maybe Jason's age, maybe a little bit older. One of his hands is on his hip and the other is dragging an expensive-looking backpack along the floor. A pair of sunglasses sits atop his head, and the gobsmacked expression on his face is actually really fucking funny.

(He's got these eyes though. Like, really, really, _unreal_ kinda blue. Who even has eyes that color?)

“And who are you?” the kid asks.

“Could ask you the same question,” Jason fires back, because he's just getting used to the idea that he _lives_ here now, and he's not—when he's nervous his hackles rise, okay? And Jason's kinda feeling a little nervous right now.

Maybe Bruce took him in because he was missing his actual kid, like a kid who brings in strays.

“I don't—I asked you first!” the kid says, and without waiting for an answer, stomps off to the kitchen, probably in search of Alfred.

Jason takes a deep breath, wills his hands to unclench around his book, calmly follows after the kid.

“Jason is a guest until Master Bruce has made his residence here more permanent,” Alfred is saying. “And you would do well to treat him as such, Master Richard.”

Richard pulls a face at that, looks about to argue before Jason interrupts.

“Richard, huh?”

“God, don't call me that,” he says quickly, almost like a reflex. He smiles, kind of shy. “My name's Dick.”

Jason resists the urge to laugh his fucking brains out. Instead, he grins, cocky like he can’t feel anticipation boiling in his gut, and holds out his hand.

“Hi then, Dick. I'm Jason.”

“Hi. Nice to meet you.”

Dick stares at Jason's outstretched hand for a while, pouting down at it. He shakes his head a little and takes a couple of steps closer and—okay. That's the first hug Jason's gotten in—well, since before Mom died.

He's.

Well.

He pushes Dick away, maybe a little more roughly than he should have; swallows and swallows again before he trusts himself enough to speak.

“Don't touch me,” is what comes out of his mouth, and before he knows it, he's stormed out of the kitchen like a drama queen and rushed up to his room.

He doesn't come out until tomorrow afternoon.

But Dick's a sneaky bastard, and he's apparently been lying in wait. The second Jason's out of his room, he pounces.

Okay, so more like he's crouched up on the top of the banister, and back-flips down (not one, not two, but fucking three flips before he touches the ground) when Jason's out of his room.

“Sorry if I freaked you out yesterday,” is the first thing he says, like he does that kind of thing every day. “It’s just I was gone on a month long field-trip thing, and I didn’t expect you. Alfred says you're prickly, but that's okay, I'm really good friends with lots of prickly people. That shouldn't be a problem.”

“Prickly?” Jason repeats because, what?

“Like a cactus,” Dick confirms, and then he makes a big show of looking around to make sure they're alone. “But, you know what, Bruce is pretty prickly too, so I figure, if I can survive him, I can figure you out, too.”

Jason says: “How did you do that flip thing?”

“I used to live in a circus,” Dick says. He smiles, but it's a sad sort of smile. Jason doesn't like it much. “I can teach you, if you want?”

Which is how Jason and Dick spend the next three hours practicing flips. They migrate outside, and end up climbing up trees for the better part of the afternoon before Alfred calls them in to dinner.

All in all, the day could have gone worse.

*

Another two weeks, and Jason is reevaluating his recent good mood. He just. He doesn't get it. He doesn't get what it is Bruce wants from him, is the problem.

The guy's not some kind of pervert, and other than that, there isn't anything Jason could really offer a guy who has everything. Bruce and Alfred have been talking about adoption papers, and it's weird because the state sure as fuck isn't going to pay for that. If Bruce had offered to be his foster home, then maybe—but why the hell would a guy like Bruce Wayne need a couple hundred bucks worth of child support from the government?

It doesn't make any sense, and it's driving Jason crazy.

It doesn't help that he figured out pretty early that Dick I-Can-Do-A-Quadruple-Somersault-Without-Even-Blinking Grayson is fucking _Robin_ to Bruce's Batman.

Batman doesn't really need two Boy Wonders to look after, does he?

Like he's been saying, it doesn't make any goddamn sense.

He finally snaps in the middle of dinner. He's been feeling shitty all day, like congested and a sore throat and some unholy mix between allergies and an honest-to-god summer cold, and he's just done with everyone's shit. Dick and Bruce have a stilted, half-conversation that Jason knows is censored for his benefit, and he just. Snaps.

“If you want me to fuck off, all you have to do is ask,” Jason says.

He's got a death grip on his silverware now, shaking with rage, or uncertainty, or something. Probably rage. It's easy to turn the small, timid feelings into anger anyway. That little bubble of hope he'd been feeling, the one that thought he'd maybe found a home? Yeah, that gets turned into anger in a rush.

“What are you talking about?” Dick asks, in that special tone of voice people use for the dying.

And just, how do people not get pissed off when someone's being—being so damn placating all the time? Jason pushes away from the table abruptly, gets a mild satisfaction from the heavy crack the chair makes as it falls.

“I don't know why you brought me here,” Jason says, and he refuses to drop his gaze, even when faced with the Batman Glare of Doom. “But you can't just fucking talk to your kid like I'm not even in the room and expect me to. Expect me to—”

Dick looks confused now, takes a half-step forward and seems to remember that there's a giant fucking table in his way.

“Jason, what—”

“I know what it looks like when someone doesn't want me around, okay?” Jason growls, and the words come out sounding all wrong, small and defeated where Jason wants to hit something. “So don't fucking—whatever, I'll fuck off if you want me to. I just don't get why you brought me here in the first place.”

Jason's about halfway through his dramatic exit when Bruce's voice stops him.

“Jason.”

And it's only one goddamn word, and Jason's never had a dad, has done just fine without one, so he doesn't know what compels him to stop in his tracks.

“What?”

There's a couple muffled sounds, but Jason is not giving in to temptation and turning back around, even when he hears the telltale signs of Bruce's shoes crossing to him. What he doesn't expect is a hand being placed gently on his shoulder.

“I've told Dick before to be careful with the secret identities of his friends,” Bruce says. Jason lets himself be turned around, so that he's facing Bruce again. “That doesn't mean we don't want you around.”

“Whatever,” Jason says, and sneezes. “I just. Why did you bring me here? What do you want from me?”

Something flickers over Bruce's expression, there and gone too fast to interpret. Jason frowns.

“I brought you here because you have potential,” Bruce says slowly, like maybe he's choosing his words carefully. “And I thought you would flourish with more opportunities available to you than a life on the streets would give you. I don't expect anything from you except to be happy here.”

“Oh.”

It's all Jason can think of to say, but that's when Dick pops out of nowhere again and grabs his hand.

“Come on,” he urges, tugging Jason into the living room. “Now that that's been dealt with, Alfred says you're sick.”

“I'm not—”

“And Bruce is letting me skip patrol so I can keep you company. So we're having a movie night.”

“But I don't want to—”

“After that less than astrous dinner? Sure you do! You just never've had one before, which is a tragedy, by the way, but that's okay. I'll help you out here, Jay. Don't worry.”

Jason lets himself be pulled along because he _does_ feel pretty much like shit, and he can't really help it if he gets a little clingy and needy when he's sick, can he?

Jason cries like a baby during _The Iron Giant_. He can't help it. Apparently he has a soft spot for a weapon that chose to be something better in the end, and he is definitely ignoring the extended metaphor there, no matter the dopey, watery smile Dick sends him once the credits start rolling.

“God, shut up,” Jason mumbles, rubbing at his eyes.

Dick laughs a little, sprawls sideways on the couch until his head is resting on Jason's thigh. They doze some more during _How to Train Your Dragon_ , and when Jason startles awake, Bruce is sitting on the couch beside them, a bowl of popcorn in his lap. Jason mumbles something and leans into his side without thinking too hard about it. He tries (unsuccessfully) to ignore the warm, fuzzy feeling in his gut, and lets Dick's soft snoring and Bruce's even breathing lull him to sleep.

*

Sometime towards the end of June, Dick bursts into the Manor shrieking like a banshee. He rips off his button down with so much force that a couple of buttons go flying in opposite directions, but he doesn’t even seem to notice. He just bundles the thing up with his backpack and tosses it halfway up the stairs, where it makes an ominous thumping sound. 

Bruce’d gotten Jason a tutor after the movie-night incident, to “better prepare him for the upcoming school year,” according to Alfred, so Jason’s working on some geometry assignments when the whirlwind that is Dick storms in. 

“What’s up, Dickie?” Jason asks, can’t help but smile helplessly back at the stupid grin plastered all over Dick’s face. 

“School’s out!” Dick says. He flicks off his shoes and clambers up to the top of the sofa, where he flops down like the world’s weirdest Snoopy-imitator. “I don’t have to go back to that awful, rich-kid place for two whole months.”

“Lucky you,” Jason says, and turns back to his homework. He counts slowly in his head, and before he even reaches eight, Dick grumbles theatrically and slides down the sofa so his head thumps onto the cushions by Jason’s thigh. 

“That means no more schoolwork,” Dick says firmly, and quick as a goddamned alleycat, he flips upright and snatches Jason’s books away. “Today is going to be great, okay? Just wait and see.”

Less than five minutes later, they’re joined at the manor by three red-heads and a scowling kid with a black superman shirt. 

“Is this Jason?” the girl asks. She has a pretty smile and a smattering of freckles along the bridge of her nose, and when she turns to the scowling kid, his frown melts away and he suddenly looks like the spitting image of Mr. Clark fucking Kent.

“Yup, this is my new little brother,” Dick says, and wraps an arm around Jason’s shoulder.

“I’m not your brother,” Jason snaps on impulse, pushes Dick away and tries very hard to ignore the hot flush creeping up his neck.

“You live here now, Jay,” Dick says. “Circus rules dictate we are now family.”

“Wow, that means Kon and M’gann are circus brother and sister,” the other redhead says. “Incest much?”

Dick laughs at the twin pouts that appear on Superman Jr and the girl’s faces.

“Okay Jay, so these are my friends,” Dick says, with a weird emphasis on the word “friends.” “That’s Conner, M’gann, Wally, and Garfield.”

“Just Gar,” the kid named Garfield says. He’s a runt of a kid, with big green eyes and a scrawny frame. From the looks of it, he’s probably M’gann’s younger brother. Jason’s willing to bet he’s about 10 or 11 years old. 

“Artemis is out with Rocket, Kal, and Roy,” Wally says. “So it’ll just be us today.”

“Wolf didn’t want to leave the mountain,” Kon adds kind of glumly, and M’gann nudges him.

“I’m sure we can have fun without him,” she says around a laugh.

“Go grab a pair of shoes,” Dick whispers to him when Kon sighs theatrically. “And maybe some beach towels while you’re at it. This is a recurring argument that they—hey, wait. Are you wearing Wonder Woman socks?”

“She’s the best out of all the Justice League and anything you say is wrong,” Jason mutters very quickly, then jets up the stairs before he can hear the response. 

They end up on a relatively empty beach somewhere outside the city, where the dank Gotham waters are less than a smudge on the horizon. They’d had to sneak down into the cave to use the boom tube things down there that, according to Wally, “scramble up your atoms and put them somewhere else, it’s super cool really.” Jason’s only ever been to the grey rocky shores of Gotham bay in the summer once, when a thick cloud of smog blanketed the city and the only relief had been out by the water. But Gotham’s murky bay and its lazy current is nothing compared to the bright ocean at high tide. 

“Come on Jay,” Dick says when M’gann does something that makes her peachy skin green and puts her in a bright purple swim suit. “The water’s getting cold!”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” Jason mutters, but he obligingly pulls off his shirt and tackles Dick when they get about knee-deep. 

(Jason doesn’t think he’s laughed so much in years).

*

A week later, a tall girl named Babs comes over, and they play monopoly until Dick is broke and Jay owns two-thirds of the board.

“You’re quite the business man, Jason,” she says, and ruffles his hair. 

Jason endures it from her because he’s feeling magnanimous, plus the tragic faces Dick’s making at his wheelbarrow when it lands on Jason’s heavily developed Boardwalk more than make up for it.

“How about if I just take you to the actual boardwalk, instead of paying you? Come on, how do you expect anyone to shell out two thousand bucks?!”

Jason laughs even as a small blush crops up around his ears. Babs smirks in that cat-got-the-cream sort of way and says “As the bank, I’m going to allow this.” She thumbs out four orange five-hundred dollar bills and hands them to Jason with a wink. “Dickie owes you one date to the boardwalk, okay? Don’t let him weasel out of it.”

“Thank my lucky elf boots,” Dick says, and flops dramatically to the floor, upending the board as he goes.

As luck would have it, tomorrow night sees a minor breakout from Arkham, so Batman and Robin whisk away to catch Penguin and Scarecrow while Jason sits at home and sulks. Alfred makes him go to bed at about 3:30 am, and when he’s slipping on some pajamas, a small paper floats to the ground from the folds of the fabric.

_I. O. U._

_One Date. Gotham Boardwalk._

_Reimbursement Price: 2000 monopoly dollars  
Estimated value: priceless_

_-Dick_

Jason falls asleep clutching the note to his chest. 

*

“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” Jason says. They’re out in front of the manor, all three of them, for once; Jason eyeing driveway in obvious trepidation. Dick’s in his dumb sunglasses, and with Bruce Wayne looming behind them both, Jason feels stupid and out of place. “Can’t I just stay here? Alfred promised he’d teach me how to make gingersnaps.”

“You’ll be fine,” Dick says, smiles in the way that normally coaxes an answering smile from Jason, but now only makes him more nervous. “You already know some of them. And Gar lives there anyway. If worst comes to worst—which it won’t—you can find him and hang out.”

“You’ve been excelling in your personal training,” Bruce says, and Jason feels a stubborn swell of pride at those words. “Today we’re merely testing the waters.”

Jason tries to squash the little bubble of hope he feels at the words, but it fills him entirely, makes him tremble from the force of it, a little. They’ve been bouncing around the idea of him maybe joining Batman and Robin, maybe even the team Dick’s on. Jason would be lying if he said it wasn’t everything he’s dreamed of. Bruce’s Audi creeps up to the house, with a slightly bemused Clark Kent in the driver’s seat.

“Absolutely no one believed I could afford this kind of car, Bruce,” Clark says; to the boys, he adds “hello Dick, Jason.”

Dick waves back happily, but Jason scowls, remembering the squinty-eyed glare Clark had given him weeks ago (Jason has a problem with grudges; he’s not ashamed to admit it). Bruce gives them both a meaningful stare before he slides into the passenger seat and they drive off. 

“Just wait ‘til the Gotham Gazette gets an eye on them,” Dick says, waggling his eyebrows suggestively.

“Clark’s a reporter, Dick,” Jason says. “No one’s going to suspect him trying to get all cozy with Gotham’s resident secret-keeper.”

The more Jason thinks about it, really, the better the secret identity becomes. But Jason doesn’t want to grudgingly respect Superman, not just yet, so he stays sullenly silent after that until Alfred comes by in the BMW. 

It’s not a long drive to Happy Harbor, but it’s longer than Jason is comfortable with. He’s still not really used to cars if he’s not disemboweling them for spare parts, and if he’s not careful, he might get carsick. Dick nudges him in the ribs after a while, to get his attention.

“What?” Jason asks, a frown tugging at his lips.

Dick shrugs. He pulls off the sunglasses and rests his feet on the front passenger seat, arms crossed behind his head. 

“Just wanted to know what you were thinking,” he says, like it’s a normal thing to say.

Jason doesn’t want to answer. For all his bravado, his excitement from earlier is quickly souring into dread.

“This was a stupid idea,” Jason says. He fidgets a little in his seat, wonders how fast they might be going. If he could duck and roll the way Batman showed him, would he be able to escape this stifling car?

“No it’s not,” Dick says. He’s smiling, but it’s not his usual carefree smile. This one’s complicated, laced with all sorts of things Jason doesn’t know how to read. He wonders if, with practice, he’d get better. “Jay, you’re a great fighter. You’re good at thinking on your feet. You’ll do great.”

“I’m not a hero,” Jason says, and it comes out small and scared, just too truthful to shrug off.

“I think you are,” Dick answers. He pulls something out of his pocket, something small and shiny, clenches his fist around it when he looks back up at Jason. “Hey, did I ever tell you about how I became Robin?”

“Batman adopted you, and you snooped around until you found out his secret.” Jason rolls his eyes, and a small smirk finally cracks to his face. “Like, a million times.”

But Dick only shakes his head.

“No. Well, okay _yeah_. But that’s just when I became Batman’s Robin. I’d been a robin before that.” Dick opens his hand, and sitting in his palm is a small, golden brooch. Two birds, wings splayed, entwine around one another, their little beaks making a tiny triangle. “Bruce may have gotten me a fancy costume and a grappling hook, but he didn’t teach this robin to fly, you know?”

Jason plucks the brooch from Dick’s palm, gently, like it might crumble under his fingers.

“What does this have to do with anything?” he asks, his voice a little rough. 

“I want you to have it.”

“What? No, I can’t. Dick, I—”

“You can be a hero, Jason,” Dick says, grabs Jason’s hand in both of his. Jay’s fingers feel warm and tingly at the contact. The urgency in Dick’s voice is terrifying. “You can be a Robin if you tried.”

Jason bites his lip and nods, clutches the brooch close to his chest. After a few moments of silence, Dick chuckles a little.

“I’ve been meaning to make a few changes to my look anyway,” he says, back to being flippant but for the glassy look to his eyes.

“Were you now?” Jason asks, playing along. 

“Yeah. What do you think of ‘Nightwing’?”

"I think it sounds like you're letting Bats fry your brains."

Dick only hums in response, but hey. As long as Dick stays away from the annoying habit superheroes have of adding color to their names, Jason won't really complain. And if he holds Dick's robin brooch in his palm so hard it leaves an imprint in his hand, so what? No one'll be looking too closely anyway.


	6. 5.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jason makes a mistake. He's not entirely to blame.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes hello I am alive don't be mad here's another cliffhanger sorry. 
> 
> (PS yes there are a lot of typos, but if I don't post it now, I never will >

After that catastrophic meeting with the one-and-only Dick Grayson, Jay decides to throw his plan out the window. It’s true that this thought comes after a very long ride on the side of a freight truck, a subsequently less-than-graceful leap off into Gotham Bay, and most of a bottle of Jack later, but Jason doesn’t think that matters much.

Actively trying to lie low hasn’t been working. In fact, that mode of thinking had just gotten him repeatedly found out. Obviously, the only course of action right now is to fall back to old habits.

Well, the first course of action is to find something to eat, because it’s now probably close to 8 in the morning, and he’s liable to get arrested at this rate for loitering unless he sobers himself up a little.

He wanders into the first deli he sees and orders a hoagie from the butcher. He is blissfully, wonderfully unrecognized throughout the whole exchange. Afterwards, he feels like pushing his luck, and circles around to the entertainment district. Walks right by precinct 215 and waves cheerily at a couple of cops lounging about. They wave back, somewhat baffled. Jason takes another bite of his sandwich. 

And so he wanders; for most of the day, he weaves his way through the almost-forgotten back alleys of his home. At around midday he gives half of his sandwich to a skinny kid on an abandoned porch step, who looks at him like Christmas came early and gobbles it down in one gulp. 

He encounters no robberies, no superheroes, and, most crucially, absolutely no bats. 

Jason thinks about a lot of different things as he wanders through his city, until he comes across a vaguely familiar building and sprawls across the cracked cement of its porch. He thinks about Alfred, and the picture in his pocket that could burn a hole in his chest if he let it. He thinks about Arsenal, about Gar. He wonders where all his righteous anger has gone.

But mostly, he thinks about Dick Grayson. 

Dick Grayson in his stupid Robin outfit so many years ago, his carefree laugh as he flew through the air like gravity didn’t apply to him while Jason clumsily tried to imitate him. The day he’d modeled his new Nightwing uniform to Jay, who’d made fun of him relentlessly but was secretly jealous of its simplicity.

The first person who believed he could be a good guy, if he only tried. 

Jason rifles through his pockets until he finds a small gold brooch. Dick had given him his old Robin brooch what felt like an eternity ago, and Jason still carries it everywhere. It’s the only thing that survived through everything Jay himself had, and even though he’s tried to forget the life he had before his death, the carefully polished brooch now shows him how futile it was.

If he had really given up on that life, on Bruce and Dick and Babs, he would have thrown the stupid trinket into a river ages ago. Instead, he’s kept it in his pocket at all times, a small weight to ground him.

God, he is so pathetic. 

Sometime today, it started snowing, and now he brushes off the thin layer of it that had collected on his shoulders and the top of his hood. The sun at least, has started setting. He wonders if he’ll run into Dick again tonight; if he should go _looking_ for the former boy wonder.

In his half-hearted wandering, Jay’s only figured out one thing: he is so tired of running. 

He just—he doesn’t know anymore. There’s a cold, hollow feeling in his stomach where his anger used to live, something he’d been trying to ignore since he first stepped foot on US soil again. He doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s been driven by his anger, his need for revenge for so long now that the absence of it is startling.

He. Well, if he’s honest with himself, he wants to go home. 

Jason wonders if he still has a home. He clutches the brooch in his hand, thinks about the photo Alfred had left on his gravestone. The ghost of another Robin shadowing the only man he thought to call a father. He thinks he’s got a pretty good idea about the answer.

“Hey, man,” a hulking police officer says, startling Jason out of his thoughts. “You can’t sleep here.”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” is Jay’s answer, which, for some reason seems to set the cop on edge. He puffs his chest out like a gorilla and starts looming over Jason.

“Just get the hell out of here, kid.”

Jay stands at that because 1) he’s not a kid anymore and 2) he really hates the kind of cop that treats homeless people like shit. He guesses his good-luck streak (however small it was) just ended.

“Where am I supposed to go, officer?” he asks, a few feet left of innocent. Somehow, he manages to make “officer” sound like “horseshit.” One of his best talents.

“I don’t care,” is the response, “as long as it’s not somewhere on my patrol.”

“Listen man, I’m gonna level with you,” Jay says, this time with none of his previous smugness. He’s completely serious, in a way that has only ever led to bloodshed in the past. Vaguely, he feels the beginning of that dangerous type of anger start to simmer again. “You’re the type of guy that really belongs in a grave.”

“Excuse me?” the cop sputters.

“You spend all day acting like you’re better than the people you’re supposed to protect, but when push comes to shove, you still let those crazy guys in masks do all the dirty work, don’t you?”

A crowd starts forming around them—mostly homeless people in their threadbare rags, but a handful of others stop to watch too. Jay spots a couple of kids with their phones out, pointing at their exchange. Jay grins his shark-grin, watches the way the cop’s hackles rise some more.

“What have you done for this city?” Jay asks him, taking a step closer. The man reaches to his belt; Jay catalogues the movement, thinks of the few weapons he has on him at this moment. Wishes he’d brought all his guns and ammo on this ill-advised trip to Gotham. “What do you do when you put on your uniform except bully the people who you don’t think are worth shit?”

At that, he gets a smattering of applause from the homeless guys behind him. He spots another group of Guys In Blue coming up from West 32nd Ave. His hackles start to rise; he knows this is a bad idea, but he’s itching for a fight now. 

“You don’t know how hard my job is,” the cop answers. “I’ve seen so much on the job, just to keep people like you safe! You can’t imagine the shit I’ve been through!”

“Yeah, sure,” Jason says, then pushes around him to storm away.

What happens next goes down so quick that Jay acts purely on instinct. 

It goes like this: Annoying Cop grabs Jay at the wrist, probably thinking to arrest him for disorderly conduct or some bullshit. Jason pulls away on instinct, hears the clip of a safety being pulled off a gun. Suddenly, he’s back in Germany, in a stinking den somewhere in the basement a bar, surrounded by drunk assholes.

He hears the cop say “That’s enough!” but also, bizarrely, hears someone from his past scream “I’m gonna cut your stomach right out of you, meatbag!”

Jason turns around and doesn’t know if he’s staring at a cop with a gun or a thug with a serrated knife, so he ducks and kicks his leg out, sends the man sprawling until he grinds to a stop in the middle of the road.

“Assault!” someone yells. “Cop killer!”

Then all Jay can hear is the blood pounding in his ears as chaos erupts around him. The crowd that has formed around him turns into a stampede as the other cops rush to the scene, barking orders. Annoying Cop stands again and aims his gun at where Jay stood seconds ago, would have got him in the stomach with his shot if Jay hadn’t leapt up onto a nearby lamppost seconds ago. 

He’s only up there long enough to confuse the guy, then flips back down to him, starts throwing punches with the kind of brutal force he thought only hours ago had left him. He doesn’t know if that heavy crunching sound is his fists or the guy’s nose. Doesn’t stop to care. The man is on the ground now, and Jay doesn’t even need to think about it; he grabs his gun and shoots off three rounds into the night. Soon the three cops rushing in as backup drop to the floor. 

The screaming and shouting around him mix with the cheering onslaught in his mind, and he looks down at his hands and can’t tell if the blood they’re dripping is innocent or not. 

Above the chaos, he hears the wailing of police sirens, and the fog in his mind starts to lift. Everything goes sideways for a moment, as he looks down at the man at his feet, at the three others in a heap 40 feet from him. For a moment, he feels like he’s gonna puke, like the first time he ever took a life, seventeen months ago with Talia at his back whispering _It’s for his own good Jason. This man’s guilt is so deep, he must be slashed off the earth._

He drops the gun. He starts running again.

*

Dick heads to Wayne Manor because he doesn’t know what else to do. He’d been yards away from Jason, and then he’d simply vanished. He knows, intellectually, that Jason had probably grabbed a ride on the truck as it was speeding by, but that isn’t really stopping his imagination from running wild. His paranoia too. 

He doesn’t think he has it in him to drive all the way back to Bludhaven. He barely has it in him to drive to Wayne Manor, at that. The look Alfred gives him when he pulls his bike into the Batcave is truly something to behold. Dick wishes he was less exhausted to really enjoy the sight. 

“Sorry to worry you, Alfred,” he says instead. “I was…well. And I need a couple of hours of sleep.”

“I see,” Alfred says, even though Dick’s statement had absolutely, zero percent information in it. He guesses that Alfred knows him well enough to guess where he’s been. “It’s good to have you home, Master Dick.”

“Good to be here,” Dick says, even as he shies away from the word ‘home.’ Sure, Wayne Manor used to be something like a home to him, but somewhere along the way, the hominess of it disappeared.

(Dick knows exactly when it happened; he can pinpoint it to the day, which just so happens to be carved onto a slab of rock over a now-empty grave.)

“I can have breakfast ready within the hour, Master Dick,” Alfred says, climbing up the stairs in an obvious command for Dick to follow. 

“Maybe in like, four instead?” Dick tries. “It’s been a long night.”

“Yes, undoubtedly,” Alfred says. “I imagine the vagabonds of Gotham were quite something, to go rushing off into the morning after only just arriving last night.”

“Something like that.”

Dick wonders if Alfred knows he went to visit Jason's grave that night, if he can guess what might have happened. After spending an eternity with Bruce, Dick thinks Alfred is probably the true Greatest Detective there must be.

“I’m flattered, sir,” Alfred says, which alerts Dick to the fact that he’s started mumbling under his breath again. He used to do it as a kid, when he was just figuring out that a body did, in fact, need more than two hours of sleep a week. “Your room is as it always is. I daresay you need to get more rest.”

So much sass, Dick thinks. He smiles crookedly.

“Thanks, Alfred. Wake me up at lunchtime, will you?”

“Of course, sir.”

He doesn’t, of course. Dick wakes up abruptly sometime closer to dusk, breathing heavily from a nightmare he can’t quite remember. 

“Great,” he mumbles to himself, rubbing his head a bit to clear the grogginess from it. 

A whole day, wasted! He meant to comm Tim and Babs about his run-in last night, but he’d been so damn _tired_. He doesn’t even remember climbing the stairs to his room, not really. He drags himself out of bed after several minutes of bemoaning his lost day.

Alfred is in the kitchen, doing Alfred-y things. Cleaning the dishes, it looks like. Dick wonders for a second what it is Alfred actually does with his time nowadays, before he notices a large plate of scrambled eggs sitting on the counter beside the sink.

“You’re a lifesaver, Alfred,” Dick says. He hops up onto the counter like he used to when it was too tall for him and begins scarfing down his breakfast-dinner. Alfred watches him with deadpan eyes, something close but not quite judgmental. 

“A skill I have perfected over my employment,” Alfred says, and the level of sass there is just amazing, really. 

His lip twitches a bit as he says it. When he was younger, Dick used to pull all sorts of crazy stunts to get that half-smile on Alfred’s lips. Later, when Jason was in the picture, it seemed so much easier. Like Alfred was indulging him. Which makes sense. Dick did much of the same with Jason. After all, he’d first shown up at Wayne Manor looking like he’d never gotten so much as a thank you from other people, let alone anything as outlandish as affection or affirmation. Plus, Dick has always been a hugger. 

“B-man still out of town?” he asks around a mouthful.

“Out of galaxy, yes.”

Dick hums in response to that. He doesn’t really want to do another sweep of Gotham tonight or of Bludhaven, even though both cities can’t quite go a full day without some sort of catastrophe befalling it. He remembers a conversation he’d had with Kaldur what seems like an entire lifetime ago, wonders if he even has a choice in this whole superheroes thing anymore. 

“Alfred,” Dick says then. “What do you think would happen if we all just…stopped doing this crazy stuff?”

Alfred looks at him hard, sets down a plate into a sink full of soapy water. A difficult expression crosses his face. Worry, relief, sadness, and maybe something that could even be happiness all there and gone in the blink of an eye. Alfred grabs a kitchen towel and dries his hands absently.

“If it were possible, I would think quite a miracle had occurred,” Alfred says. “It is something I’ve been hoping for for many years, now.”

“Since Jason’s death?”

“Since Master Bruce first came home from his travels full of revenge.”

“Do you think its possible?”

“For Master Bruce? No.” 

“What about us? Babs and Tim and me?”

Again, Alfred takes his time answering. Dick looks down at his plate, a couple of scraps of eggs growing cold. He’s been avoiding the thought since the whole Jason debacle, but now it all seems tied together. Get Jason back, and then what? Will he be able to ever have a normal life?

“Tell me, Master Dick,” Alfred says instead of answering, “Do you miss Thanksgiving dinner?”

“What are you talking about?” 

“Do you remember when Master Bruce managed to avoid the charity galas to spend a quiet dinner with you on Thanksgiving? Sometimes you would invite Wally, Roy, and Kaldur over, and later, Konner and M’gann and Artemis.”

He stops there, visibly swallows something back. Dick doesn’t need to hear how this story goes. November 24. Sometimes that would land on Thanksgiving day, more often than not, the day before or after. How could they celebrate being thankful for anything when such a bright candle had been snuffed out so suddenly? Dick remembers that first year, before Tim had elbowed his way into their good graces: Bruce staying out until the first rays of sunlight peeked through the curtains in Dick’s windows, not even bothering to come into the Manor proper. He’d locked himself in the Batcave the week before and weeks after, and nothing Dick said could get the haunted look out of his eyes.

And Dick wasn’t much better.

“I miss it,” Dick says, “But I don’t think we’ll ever be able to have a normal one. Not again.”

Silence falls between them again, and Dick lets it smother him, a little. The sadness is back in Alfred’s eyes, but it’s quieter now, a little harder to find. In a couple of minutes, they can both pretend this conversation never happened. Alfred’s good about that.

“I’ll be in the Batcave,” Dick says.

“Of course.”

Dick hops off the counter and wanders away, lost in thought. He’s going over his conversation as he descends the stairs to the cave, wonders at what Alfred was implying. Thinks, yet again, of Kaldur, Wally disappearing in a cloud of electricity just months ago. How many loved ones are they willing to lose?

“You’ve got your brooding face on,” Tim says from behind Bruce’s chair.

Dick has a mild (silent) heart attack at the voice.

“Tim! I didn’t expect you to be here.”

“I could say the same of you.”

Dick leapt over the last five steps, landed somewhat messily behind the giant computer banks. Tim spins around in his chair in an over-dramatic way he must have picked up from Bruce.

He looks. Well. Honestly, Tim kind of looks like shit. His skin is about two shades paler than normal, and his eyes look sunken in, too-dark. He’s still in his Robin suit, but it looks like it’s been through Hell and back. The mask is sitting sadly on the floor, like he’d jerked it off in a moment of frustration. He’s slumped against an armrest, trying to pull off the casually uninterested thing, but Tim has never been good at being anything but awkward. It’s painfully obvious he hasn’t had much sleep.

“You look like trash, Dick,” Tim says on a sigh. 

“Look who’s talking, little brother!” Dick says on instinct, finding his ennui can indeed be pierced by outrage. “Have you found anything else out?”

Tim shakes his head.

“Babs got into contact with me. Finally,” Tim says. Dick feels a stubborn flare of hope, one Tim quickly stomps out when he adds, “Turns out she wasn’t actually following a lead on Jason, but on Ra’s Al Ghul. She was looking for connections to The Light.” 

“Oh.” Dick tries not to feel resentful. “That’s important. That’s. Good for her. What did she learn?”

“Wouldn’t say,” Tim says. He sounds frustrated. “Not enough evidence to support her hypothesis. Whatever it is.”

“Oh,” Dick says again. “Okay. Well.”

He guesses that’s okay, too. Babs is probably doing very important stuff for The Team. Very important things that have nothing to do with Jason Todd. Which is completely fine because as far as she knows, Jason’s trail has gone cold, and anyway she and Tim don’t have much faith in Jason’s motives. Dick suspects that if Bruce were still on planet, he might have even called off their investigation by now.

“Batgirl knows what she’s doing,” Tim says. 

He turns back to the computer banks, laces his fingers together as he stares up at the screen. The screen is currently filled with the CCTV of some of the more dangerous streets of Gotham. Dick watches Tim’s eyes flicker from one empty street to the next.

“Doesn’t mean you have to like it,” Dick adds, guessing at Tim’s reactions.

Silence stretches between them for a while. Tim watches the computer screens like he needs them to breathe, and Dick watches him. He wonders if Tim knows how much he looks like Bruce. He knows that maybe someday, Tim will have what it takes to take up the Batman cowl. He’s still not sure whether to be proud or sorrowful about that.

“I’m calling off the search,” Tim says. If possible, he sounds even more weary than before.

“What?” Dick says. On instinct, he adds, “No. We can’t just stop looking for him, Tim!”

“It’s been over three weeks, Dick,” Tim says. He’s still frowning up at the computer monitors, a classic Bruce move. “I don’t think there’s anything left to gain from us wandering around the planet searching for him.”

“Three weeks isn’t nearly enough time to give up on a missing person's case,” Dick says. He stalks over to the computer and sits on part of the long, metal desk. Crosses his arms over his chest. “I don’t think we can give up yet.”

“It’s not a missing person's case if the person doesn’t want to be found!”

“You don’t know that,” Dick says stubbornly. 

Tim stands at that, runs a hand through his hair; paces the space between the computer banks and the stairs that lead up into the manor. 

“Dick. All the evidence suggests that Jason doesn’t want to come back. We have to let him go.”

“I can’t!” Dick says before he even means to. Tim bites his lip, takes a breath as if to continue arguing, but Dick holds up a hand. “Tim, I can’t just leave him. Not again. I—I let him go once before, and I can’t do it again. Not when—not when I _know_ Jason is here. Waiting to come home.”

“You can’t know that, Dick.”

Tim sounds pitying now. Like Dick’s gone completely delusional. It’s that, more than anything, that makes him push out his next words.

“I saw him last night.”

That gets the reaction Dick is waiting for. Tim turns back to him, a strange mix of curiosity and disbelief on his face. 

“Where? Did you talk to him? What was he doing?”

“I. I went to his grave. It’s not what you think,” Dick says, because he knows the look that Tim is shooting him. “There was someone else there, and I thought it was strange at four in the morning. So I followed them. He ran away, and then. He. I called out to him, and he just. He stopped. Looked at me. It was him, Tim. I know it was.”

“What else did he say?”

“He, uh. Disappeared after that.”

Tim groaned dramatically at that and ran a hand through his hair. 

“That’s part of my point,” Tim says after a second. “Everything I’ve found out suggests he’s put this part of his life,” here, he vaguely gestures around the room. He could mean the Batcave, the entire world, or Dick in particular. “He’s put _us_ behind him. I think we should do the same.” 

“I don’t think so,” Dick says again. “There has to be a different explanation.”

“He killed a man, Dick. There isn’t really any coming back from that.”

Dick turns away, unable to deal with the finality of that statement. He knows Bruce, probably even Barbara would think the same. Everyone has taken Bruce's oath to heart. _If you kill someone you're no better than the people we're fighting._ Hell, Dick was even inclined to believe that idea only a few months ago. To buy himself some time, he turns back to the computer banks. On one of the screens, what appears to be a homeless man is arguing with a police officer just on the outskirts of Crime Alley. He’s drawing a crowd. 

“Things aren’t that black and white sometimes,” Dick finally says. “There has to be more to the story, don’t you think?”

Dick listens to the slow creep of Tim’s feet as he draws near. Tim isn’t one for tactile forms of expression, so he’s surprised when he feels a hand wrap around his elbow.

“Okay,” Tim says, in a way that Dick knows is just placating him. 

Dick wants to argue, fights the sudden urge to push Tim away. But at that moment, the argument between that homeless man and the cop escalates. The homeless man kicks the cop so hard he slides almost ten feet away, then the man _leaps straight up into the air_ , like a bird taking flight.

“Look,” Dick says, pointing at the man perched atop a streetlight. As they watch, he somersaults down and begins beating the man with a brutal single-mindedness. People are running everywhere when the man grabs the police officer’s gun and shoots out of the camera’s line of sight.

“Suit up, Dick,” Tim says, but Dick’s already rushing to get changed. 

Tim sends the coordinates of the incident to his motorbike’s GPS and heads out before Dick, probably to start restoring order to the neighborhood. It is, after all, on the verge of a riot.

Neither of them see the man on the screen stagger away from the body and drop the gun. Nor do they see the two seconds when Jason Todd looks almost directly into the camera, eyes wild and searching before he bolts out of screen.


	7. 6.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Nightwing finally catches a jaybird.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two whole updates in one year! It's like I finally figured out how this is going to end or something!

The light snow from earlier is quickly becoming a flurry as Jason leaves the chaotic scene behind him. His head has cleared a bit, enough to slow his pace from the frantic run and really think about what he’s done. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling as he climbs up a fire escape, not really, but there are several things that he knows for a fact:

One: There is no way that good old Batman hasn’t already heard about what just went down.

Two: Very soon he may just have the entirety of the Bat-clan on his tail. Again. This time the may even have shoot-to-kill orders.

And Three: He feels only the most intellectual type of remorse for the men he’s just killed.

It’s that last point that’s going to be a problem. Jason has a code, even if it’s slightly incomprehensible to anyone else: don’t hurt the innocent. It’s debatable whether or not those few men were “innocent,” given the track record of corruption around the Gotham PD, but that’s really not an excuse. What’s left to separate him from the other nut jobs that litter the underbelly of the world if not his own morals, however tenuous they may be?

He imagines that they all had families, volunteered at a soup kitchen every other weekend. Maybe they just finished with a Thanksgiving dinner and were on their way home? Jason doesn’t feel anything but a subtle disappointment in himself. He knows he can do better, and that’s the scary part.

He just doesn’t know if he _wants_ to.

Jay’s let his body go on autopilot, which turns out isn’t the greatest thing to do when he finally misjudges a leap across buildings and tumbles down through the air. His heart skips a beat, and he turns a little as he falls, hits the metal railing of an old, rusted fire escape and crashes through to the cold, slushy floor.

“Fuck,” he gasps after a second, and just lies there for a minute, staring up into the warped grating of the landing above him. 

Luckily, his only injury from that fall was probably a bruise on his tailbone. That stupid metal cage broke his fall, but his ass is killing him. So inconvenient. Once he catches his breath, he stands and tests his theory before gauging his surroundings.

He’s fallen into a painfully familiar alleyway. He stares at a small patch of dirt not twenty feet in front of him, unable to believe his bad luck. Down here, the buildings block much of the snowstorm, so it’s less snow and more of a dank, muddy slush that’s collecting at the edges of the buildings. A dumpster sits along the far side of the alley now, one that wouldn’t have been there four or five years ago. Jason imagines the dimensions of Bruce’s old Batmobile, remembers the cocky greed that goaded him into trying to steal Bruce’s tires.

“Are you kidding me,” he whispers into the darkness. 

He feels a stupid, inevitable lump form in his throat, a stinging in his eyes. He is so fucking _done_ running from everything. Fate or luck or whatever is just throwing its toughest hardballs at him, and Jason is done dodging them. He lets out a harsh breath, a sigh maybe, but something closer to a growl. If the universe wants him to face his demons, then fine. He’ll face anything it throws at him.

He’s always been good at resisting the old psychological torture gimmick. He takes one last look at that stupid stretch of road, a dingy place with absolutely nothing to mark it different from the rest of Gotham save for the tightness in his chest. Then, he starts to climb.

Whether or not he’s ready, this ends tonight.

*

Dick and Tim reach the scene of the crime—a short block on Jackson Avenue known mostly as a favorite spot of Poison Ivey’s—in under ten minutes. While Tim hurries over to the riot police to see what he can do to calm everyone down, Dick hangs back for a moment to scope out the area. The scene is a little bit less chaotic than Dick was expecting. There’s a surprisingly small amount of fires that need to be put out, and even fewer looters. It probably has something to do with the fact that no one was actually killed. The three officers were all shot in the same spot in the left shoulder, serious enough to shock them and to cause a bloody mess, but not enough to kill. Something warm fizzles to life in his chest; sometimes it feels like Gotham will never get any better, but it’s times like this that might just prove him wrong. 

A long line of civilians are sitting along the side of the street, some with their hands behind their heads, but most just looking a bit defeated. 

Dick learns that the man who’d been beaten is suffering critical injuries, but most of the medics are hopeful he’ll survive. Dick’s been able to gather that he’s got a broken nose, a fracture in his jaw, and the beginning signs of a mild concussion. He is also one of the precious few good cops that patrol this neighborhood. While the medics and police refuse to release his name, Dick finds out easily enough from the civilians mourning him, praying for his speedy recovery. Officer Johnny Miles. He’s new to the force, at just under a year of service, but kind enough to everyone, if a bit on the grumpy side.

When Dick decides Tim’s got the situation under control, he does a sweep of the block, searching for anything that the forensics team may have missed. He starts with the lamppost where the suspect (Dick has a sinking suspicion of who it may have been) first attacked the officer. He stares up at the light, judging the distance, the skill level needed to leap straight up into the air from a standing position to that height.

Dick crouches, thinks of all the lessons he spent with Jason, with Tim, on his favorite acrobatic trick. He leaps. From this vantage point, Dick feels a little bit more like himself. He’s never been a fan of the detective side of crime fighting, not in the meticulous way that Tim collects his information. Instead, he prefers to sit somewhere high and visualize the crime itself.

On either side of the street, a police cordon has already been set up, and the flashing lights of the emergency units effectively block the street off from traffic. To his right, the row of civilians fully cooperating with the police, and just behind them, Robin is speaking quietly with Detective Isabell Long, a longtime friend of vigilante crime. To his right, a relatively empty sidewalk; the bleak faces of abandoned store fronts look in on the crime scene. 

Farther down the road, an often overlooked alley squeezed into a cattycorner just off the main road. He imagines the man in the hoodie (hopes it wasn’t red) taking off down the road, veering into the cramped space before either following the narrow back roads to safety or climbing up.

Very few people use the rooftops as exit points. If it is Jason Dick’s searching for, that’s where he’ll be. 

Dick hopes that he’ll find a random human, probably pissed off at life, maybe high on drugs, at the end of the alley. 

But who does he think he’s kidding? Dick has been running after Jason Todd for as long as he’s known the kid. Even in death, he felt like he was still chasing him, like if he didn’t make it to Jason’s grave every other week, he’d somehow disappear again; and isn’t that just the most ironic thing in the world considering everything that’s happened now? He feels a roiling in his gut that tells him he needs to be searching the skies, that maybe Tim’s been right all along and that Jason Todd really is beyond saving.

He leaps off the streetlight, crunches heavily in the couple of inches of snow that have fallen since the crime was first committed. Under his boot heel, he feels a sharp pain, like he landed on a couple of large rocks.

When he picks up his foot, he sees a large gold pin on the floor. It’s dinged a little and somewhat dirty, but he recognizes the birds. He picks it up, hardly daring to breathe. Two birds, their beaks forming a tiny triangle, stare up at him. From his past, he seems to hear the quiet voice of his mother _Happy Birthday, my little Robin_.

Dick curls his hand into a fist around the brooch, and takes off into the night. He needs to find Jason. He needs to find him now.

“Nightwing!” Robin calls from the other end of the street, but Dick doesn’t even spare a glance back to him. He just takes off into the night, firing a grappling hook as he goes.

“Don’t do anything stupid,” Robin’s voice says in Dick’s head.

“I’ll try,” Dick says, tapping a quick sequence into his wrist computer. “Going dark, Robin.”

“Nightwing, don’t—”

But then a soft, mechanized voice cuts him off, saying _Transmissions blocked. GPS echo-locator blocked._

“Sorry Tim,” Dick whispers, pulling his transmitter out of his ear. He drops it into the nearest dumpster, rationalizing that he can always build himself a new one.

He can’t do this, whatever “it” will turn out to be, with Tim in his ear. Tim’s shown that when he wants to, he can hack into Dick’s transmitter to listen in on him before, and he’s not taking any chances. 

Dick has always been pretty lucky (or unlucky, depending on your point of view) when it comes to crime fighting. Back when he was dating Babs, they would argue about it all the time; Babs was always convinced Dick wasn’t sharing all his intel with her and would go and purposefully get himself stuck in tricky situations. In contrast, Dick knows to follow his gut; it’s never steered him wrong before. Sometimes that means going after a hunch solo and paying for it in blood. So tonight, when he reaches the mouth of crime alley, Dick stops and stares. He knows, suddenly, in his gut that this is where he needs to go.

Dick was away at boarding school when Jason first came into their lives, and so he only knows from stories, mostly from Alfred, about the night Batman found little Jason Todd—thirteen and already fighting the world—and the batmobile sitting on cinderblocks. In his mind, the story has taken on mythic proportions. The alley is empty now, but something in his bones is calling him forward. 

To one side, a fire escape has been completely trashed. Something heavy must have fallen through the bottommost landing, judging by the way the grating is bent. It only serves as more proof that he’s on the right track. But why had he fallen? Was he injured now, perhaps?

“Little Wing, where are you?” he whispers to himself, and as if in answer to him, a cold breeze threads through the alley, picks up bundles of old newspapers and push them up against an old apartment complex. 

There’s a faint light glowing from the fourth floor window; Dick takes it as a sign and fires another grappling hook.

It’s louder than he wants, he knows, and if Jason is hiding from him, he no doubt will hear it and start running again. But Dick takes the chance, thinks that maybe, just maybe, Jason is as tired of hiding as Dick is of searching. 

*

He hears the tell-tale whisper of a grappling hook before he sees anyone. Whoever it is, they’re here earlier than Jason expected, which. Well. At least that means he can get this whole ordeal over with. Like ripping off a Band-Aid. He ducks into the kitchenette seconds before he hears someone jimmy open the window. 

He’s surprised—or rather, should be surprised—that it’s not Batman who stumbles into the room. Instead, Nightwing looks around the abandoned apartment, eyes inscrutable under his mask. Jason should have known. Of course Batman wouldn’t want to be the one to deal with this pest problem. He’ll send his favorite son out to dispose of the prodigal one.

Batman is probably _too busy_ for family matters.

It’s that bitter thought, more than anything else, that turns the confused roiling in his stomach into anger again. Batman lets him get killed and won’t even clean up any of the messes it brings about? Typical. There’s a reason why Joker is rotting in Arkham instead of in a grave, a reason why Jason has trained with the most dangerous people on the planet. It’s because the Batman doesn’t know how to clean up after his messes.

“Hello?” Dick says, his voice soft, like he’s coaxing out a rabid dog. “Is someone up here?”

Jason stays silent, listens to the footsteps, the tell-tale sound of someone running into something metal. Another pregnant pause, where Jason imagines Dick is picking up an old, rusted crowbar from the ground. It took Jay almost 40 minutes of dumpster diving to find one, but the sharp inhale of breath he hears makes it all worth it. A quick-burning glee at Dick’s sadness fades into something duller. That present was meant for Bruce, not Dick. 

“Jay,” Dick says into the silence, and his voice is just. Wrecked.

And Jason—he. Well. He stomps down on everything in him that isn’t anger and stands, slides his lone knife back into his boot. 

“You called?” Jason says as casually as he can; which is pretty convincing, if you ask him.

Dick swivels like a top towards him, crowbar hanging limply from his right arm. He’s bathed in shadow from the weak orange light; since the shitty light in the corner is one of Jason’s old emergency beacons from his time in Germany. For a second, Jason sees the Joker peeking out from Dick’s shadows; half of a smile here, the sharp cut of a purple suit coat holding a bloodied crowbar.

“Jason,” Dick says again, faster. 

He takes a step forward, then another, and before Jason can say anything, he’s leapt over the island and tackles Jason into the stove. Jason hears the quiet cackle of the Joker’s laugh in his mind, roughly pushes the body off of him. It’s Dick, he tells himself. Nightwing. He’s not here to kill you.

Probably.

“Hey Nightwing,” Jason says, trying to play it cool again. He forces his fists to relax on an exhale. “Long time, no see.”

“Y-yeah,” Dick says. He’s got a look on his face that Jay can’t read. Knows, at least, that it’s not thick with revenge. “Like what? Sixteen hours?”

“I’m not keeping track,” Jason answers. He smiles, slow and cocky, the smile that never fails to start a fight, “I’m touched that you’ve been keeping count.”

And Dick, the bastard; he smiles back. 

“Of course,” he says, because Jason learned how to goad criminals from Dick Grayson; of course he’d be able to tell when someone was looking for a fight. Dick takes a deep breath, lets it out in a huff. “Would you believe I had this whole big speech planned?”

“I could have guessed it.” Jason curses himself all over again. Dick takes a miniscule step forward, penning him in. He never should have hidden in the kitchen; the only way out now is straight through Dick. “Don’t think I’m in the mood for an angry rant.”

“Not angry, no,” Dick says, inches a little bit closer. And Jason—he just lets him do it. Watches Dick’s slow advance and only slides down to a sitting position, back to the stove. “Also, I’m all ranted out.”

“Guess there must be something in the air,” Jason says. 

“The speech bug?” Dick says, nodding agreeably. “It’s that time of year, you know.”

“Right,” Jason says, clenches his jaw as he watches Dick slowly crouch down until he’s sitting cross-legged, directly across from him.

“It’s true! We can trade speeches, if you want,” Dick says. He smiles, a little tentatively, like he can’t quite believe what’s happening. That would make two of them. “If you go first, that is.”

“Mine’s not meant for you,” Jason says. “It’s for Daddy dearest, and it’s not quite finished yet.”

“We could brainstorm?” Dick says crazily. “You know I’ve always been better at writing than you.”

“You wish, Dickiebird,” Jason says before he thinks better of it. The nickname sounds strange to his own ears; he doesn’t think he can even remember the last time he’d said it out loud. It seems to bolster Dick for some reason, who’s grin has reached blinding levels of relief when he gently pulls off his mask. “I. It’s you know. Probably too underwhelming now.”

“I am 100 percent ready to be whelmed,” Dick encourages.

Jason rolls his eyes. Marvels a little at how _familiar_ this whole conversation feels. He can almost pretend that it’s just the two of them, talking out some minor issue, like his death and all the baggage that goes with it don’t exist. Almost.

“I’m not a good guy anymore, Dick,” Jason says because the last of his anger crumbles at the expectant look Dick is giving him. He feels tired now, wants to just get this over with. “I’m. Well. I’m a lot of different things now. Murderer being on the top of the list.”

“I don’t believe that, Jason.”

“That’s because you’re a naïve idiot!” Jason clenches his jaw. He takes a deep breath and drops his hands to the floor, painstakingly unclenches his fists again. There’s the anger again. “You saw me in Germany. You probably already found out that Egon was murdered. Do you know the poison that did it? Do you know that I strangled him long before the poison could finish him off? That I shot him afterwards just because I couldn’t stand to look at him anymore?”

“There were kids,” Dick counters. “You saved them.”

“Yeah,” Jason says. “That placed deserved to burn. I burned the place to the ground. At the time I thought I was cleansing the earth. Right. And the four men I killed tonight?”

Dick frowns. 

“None of them are dead.”

“It doesn’t matter!” Jason shoots back. “I wouldn’t have cared if they were dead or alive!”

“We all make mistakes,” Dick says slowly, impossibly.

“Bullshit,” Jay answers. “You don’t believe that. I have no reason for why I shot those cops. I didn’t like them. I wasn’t thinking right. I had a flashback. Whatever, you can choose; that doesn’t change the fact that there is the blood of dozens of men and women on my hands now, Dick.”

Dick is silent then, the little furrow between his brows growing deeper by the minute. Finally, he speaks again.

“We can get you help, Jason.”

“I don’t want any help!” Jason screams. He stands then, relishes in the way he towers over Dick for that second before he, too, hops to his feet. 

“I don’t believe that,” Dick says again. He holds something out to Jason, something that glints in the weak light around them. “You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t want me to help you.”

After a second, Jason recognizes the brooch in Dick’s hand, and he snaps. He slaps Dick’s hand away, listens vindictively to the clinking sound the brooch makes as it hits something on the other side of the room.

“You can’t pull that shit with me again, Dick,” Jason snarls. “You _replaced_ me. You gave Robin to me, and the second I drop dead you go and—”

“I didn’t,” Dick says in a voice that’s very close to pleading. “Tim found out about us all on his own; he said Batman needed a Robin to keep him in check.”

“Batman doesn’t deserve a Robin,” Jason says savagely. “He couldn’t keep his last one alive.”

“Jay—”

“No. I don’t want to hear his petty excuses. Not from you. You want to listen to my big speech? Fine. I don’t care that no one came to save me. Okay? I get it. I went off the grid, and I paid for it, and I’ve made peace with it. But why the hell did none of you go after that fucking insane clown? Because if it were you, Dick. If it had been you that the Joker had stolen from me, you better believe that I would have stopped at _nothing_ until I knew for sure he was rotting in a hole somewhere. Dead. I would have ended him for you, Dick.”

Jason stops himself, panting heavily. The look on Dick’s face is unreadable, but Jason is almost angry enough to stop caring. Almost.

“I would have killed him,” Dick says then, which is probably the one thing he least expects to come out of his mouth. “I found him, about a month after you—after the explosion. And I—Jay. I would have killed him if Batgirl didn’t stop me. The Team pulled me out of missions; Batman wanted to fire me. You should have heard the stories Bruce told to keep me from patrolling for months afterward. Emotionally compromised, he said. Of course I was compromised! You were in a hole in the ground and none of us had been there! You died alone! Jason—”

Dick stops himself, takes a moment to swallow heavily. When he looks back at Jason, his eyes are bright. 

“Do you know, Bruce didn’t tell me he’d gotten a new Robin until Tim showed up in my old costume at HQ? It was like. Like I was dreaming, and you were alive for a second. But Tim was much smaller than you, and calmer. I knew in a second that…Well. Let’s just say that we didn’t get along too well at first. And then. And then you just showed up again after all this time in the middle of fucking Germany. Jay. I don’t care however many people you’ve killed. That doesn’t stop you from being a hero. It’s what you do from now on that defines who you are. I still think you can be a hero if you tried.”

“You,” Jason says quietly. He’s staring at Dick like—he doesn’t even know what he must look like. He feels like a bomb has gone off in his face again (first-hand knowledge of that experience, thank you), like everything around him is falling apart all over again. But this time, this time there’s someone there to catch him before he spirals into the ground. “You are the _lamest person of all time_. Oh my God.”

Dick laughs, a sound ripped out of him that is maybe just the wrong side of hysterical. Then he launches himself at Jason again, wraps his arms around Jason’s middle, and holds on tight.

“Come home, Little Wing,” he whispers into the crook of Jason’s neck. “Please. Just come home.”

“I,” Jay starts. He swallows back a strange feeling, wills the corners of his eyes to stop prickling. “I don’t have a home anymore.”

“You do,” Dick insists. His grip around Jason tightens. Any minute now Jason won’t be able to breathe. “With me. We’ll figure all of it out. Just. Come home with me.”

Well shit. What the hell is Jason supposed to say to that, anyway?

“Okay,” he says, and it feels like the word is being ripped out of his soul. “Okay.”


	8. 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Dick may or may not go back on his promise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter will make a bit more sense if you read "No Heroes Allowed," although probably isn't imperative. Take a moment to read through it! /ends shameless author plug. Anyway, the plot soldiers on, I struggle bus ahead.

**The Council of Rimbor, 2nd Quadrant – 27 November (Earth Standard)**

The room around is so white the walls sometimes seem to glitter here. There are no chairs, as the alcove he has camped out in is considered a welcoming chamber and so it is impolite to be seated in such a place, according to the local custom. A dark figure is standing by a wall made of curved glass, which overlooks a small courtyard outside. 

Down below, Superman and Wonder Woman are currently sparring with the Council of Rimbor’s newest recruits. They’re volunteers for Rimbor’s newly restructured policing agency, and as a favor to the council and a show of goodwill, many of the League’s most senior members have come to help train them.

So Bruce stands, hands behind his back, as he watches Clark unbalance a Tamaranean with hair the consistency of fire. She goes flying several feet away, but quickly regains her balance and flies back towards Clark. Bruce can tell, even from this distance, that Superman is laughing his good-natured, embarrassed laugh. Bruce frowns a bit. He was reluctant to accompany them, but eventually Clark and Diana’s combined pestering finally convinced him. His caveat was that he would be under no pressure to train with the others. 

He’s had enough of training child soldiers, truth be told. 

Also, Bruce has never forgiven the Council of Rimbor for sentencing them all to death, despite the reluctant alliance they’d forged once everyone understood the scope of Mongol’s plan. In the safety of his head, he lets himself admit that his distrust of the council is less about imprisoning them and almost completely about how easily they were swayed by bribery.

A sentient being whose alliance is so easily swayed by money or power is not an ally that Bruce wants. Batman knows this from the skeezy mobsters he’s taken down in the past years, but moreso, Bruce Wayne has gotten into bed with too many people swayed by money. 

“You seem troubled,” Martian Manhunter says from behind him. He must have solidified while Bruce was lost in thought. It is not often that members of the League can sneak up on him.

“I’m always troubled,” Bruce says dismissively. Into J’onn’s patient silence, he adds, “I don’t trust the Council of Rimbor.”

“I do not doubt many others share your distrust,” is the answer. “But with some, it is enough to hope for the best.”

Bruce’s eyes are trained on Superman, who now has three Okaarans and the same Tamaranean ganging up on him. Diana’s lasso appears suddenly, latches around two of Okaarans and drags them back to her. Even twenty feet up and separated by a wall of thick plexiglass, Bruce can hear her warcry.

“Maybe,” Bruce says. He senses J’onn’s careful approach more than anything, and when he turns to the Martian, he’s not surprised to find J’onn just behind his right shoulder. “Some have a remarkable ability to hope, even in times of great despair.”

There’s a long, pregnant pause at that, where Bruce watches his friends without really seeing them, and J’onn stays silent. Bruce is thinking of Nightwing, of his son’s complete faith in the idea that Jason Todd might still be alive. Tim has been sending him daily updates since he left the planet, and what they’ve found out already has Bruce expecting the worst.

Sometimes, he wishes he wasn’t as paranoid as he is. But then, he wouldn’t be Batman if he wasn’t paranoid.

“I believe we are no longer speaking of the Council.”

“Yes,” Bruce says simply.

J’onn inclines his head and then remains silent. It’s one of Bruce’s favorite qualities of Martian Manhunter; he has always respected the silences between thoughts. Even though he could so easily find out answers to ambiguous questions, he never forces them, never asks. Rather, he waits until someone is ready to elaborate. In Bruce’s life, that respect for privacy will always be appreciated.

“We will leave soon,” J’onn says. “Oliver is beginning to worry.”

“About Dinah? She can take care of Star City just fine.”

“He is not worried about Black Canary,” J’onn says. He has the faraway look on his face that tells Bruce he’s busy reading someone’s mind. “He is worried for his goddaughter. Lian apparently has come down with her first cold. Roy is very anxious.”

“Oliver spoils them all,” Bruce says, but he feels a small curl of warmth at the thought. 

He’s never had a child Lian’s age, but he can imagine the stress of having to care for what is essentially a granddaughter. He isn’t quite sure if he envies Oilver or not.

“One cannot blame him,” J’onn says. The hint of a smile is playing around the corners of his mouth as he says it. “Lian is quite charming.”

Bruce is about to agree—he’s met Lian Nguyen-Harper and knows first-hand the devastating effects of her smile—but just then his visor sends him a private message from Northern Asia, marked both private and urgent.

“If you’ll excuse me, J’onn,” he says, and taps one of the miniscule buttons on the inside of his glove to pull up the message. J’onn nods to him and disappears into the ether, reappears seconds later out by Wonder Woman’s side.

The message is from Batgirl. She’s sent him a short, written communication with a video recording attached.

_As of 26/11/2015 22:03 UZT: Original mission objectives abandoned without Team Leader’s consent. Current objective: Information acquisition. Requirements: DNA sample; Bruce Wayne. ETA to Gotham: 72 Hours, Code 4-Gamma, awaiting suitable coordinates. See attached holo-vid._

It’s unsigned, of course, but Bruce recognizes her communication frequency immediately. He’s more worried about the Code 4-Gamma. A Code 4-Gamma means she has a prisoner and/or witness who for security reasons cannot be brought into the Batcave. Bruce sends her the coordinates to an old Wayne Industries plant that he now uses as a makeshift holding area for just these occasions. 

Then he opens the holo-vid.

It’s got the shaky, low-quality look of a recording straight from Batgirl’s mask. He can hear wind howling somewhere in the background; perhaps there was a blizzard and she and her companions had sought refuge from the elements together. Two small children come into the screen, both of them sitting cross-legged before a weak fire. 

“I would like to renegotiate,” Batgirl says formally. 

The young boy doesn’t look at her. He continues to face the fire; the girl beside him looks up, and there is something unnerving about the way she is tracking Batgirl’s movements. Bruce knows the look of an assassin searching for weak spots in someone’s armor. He hopes Batgirl has noticed it as well. 

“Very well,” the boy says. “I hope you’ve thought of better incentives to keep me from my destiny this time.”

“I know who your father is,” Batgirl says.

At that, the young boy turns around to face her completely. The light of the weak fire is now on his back, but even through the shadows, Bruce can make out his father’s chin, the shape of his own eyes in this boy.

“I accept,” the boy says. He stands and offers his hand to Batgirl. “I, Damian Al Ghul, heir to the League of Shadows, will follow you to this ‘Gotham City.’”

“Great,” Batgirl says. At the boy’s somewhat petulant frown, she quickly adds, “I, Batgirl, heir to none except, perhaps, the World’s Greatest Detective, agree to reveal to you the identity of your father, on the condition that you accompany me to Gotham and willingly offer yourself up to my blood tests.”

They shake hands.

The transmission ends.

Bruce stands completely still, too shocked to move for the moment. He sends the recording to his computer banks in the Batcave after a moment. He takes a breath in, and on the exhale lets out everything he’s feeling. He cannot be compromised when he meets Barbara.

They need to leave. 

Bruce turns, and calmly, begins to assemble the Justice League.

*

All in all, Dick’s offer of a home lasts all of about twelve hours. They both elect to find a nice, neutral rooftop and watch the sun rise, which was nice by the way; probably the nicest few hours that Jay has had in years. And just when Jason finally starts to believe he may have actually found something—something worth hanging around for—the batsignal flickers to life in the smoggy skyline.

They stare at it for a few seconds in silence. Jason can’t make any sense of it.

“I thought the Gotham PD got rid of that thing,” he says.

“They did,” Dick says. He’s frowning now, and his hand comes up to cover his bare wrist, instinctively reaching for a communicator that isn’t there. “I think it’s for me.”

“Why would it be for you?”

“Who else could it be for?” Dick says. He stares at Jason for a long moment, like he’s trying to decide on a plan of action. Then, abruptly, he looks back to the batsignal and stands. “There’s a signal in the batcave, but it’s only ever used for emergencies. They wouldn’t have any other way to contact me tonight.”

“Great,” Jason says, and it’s not great at all. He should have known. 

"I won't be gone long."

Jason doesn’t say anything, because the only retorts he can think of at the moment sound too bitter even in his head. Dick is back to watching him like a hawk, a frown wrinkling the corners of his mouth and the space between his eyebrows. Jason should have guessed something like this was coming. None of them can sit still for more than a few hours. As they say, crime never sleeps. 

"Batman calling you back?" Jason finally asks, and surprises himself with how calm his voice sounds. None of his bitterness actually shows.

By the way Dick looks away, Jason knows the answer. Then, a thought occurs.

"Wait. He doesn't even know you found me, does he?"

"We all think it's in our best interests to keep this information to ourselves, for the time being," Dick says, too-quick and just a bit defensive (Jason thinks he might have practiced the phrase in the mirror). 

“And by ‘all’, you mean ‘you’?” Dick doesn’t answer, so Jason just continues, the slow burn of anger—always only just banked away—begins to flare into life. "Are you scared he'll do something rash? Or that I will?"

"It's not that," Dick presses. He runs a hand through his unkempt hair, one of his few tells right now. Despite being an open book, when he wants to, Dick can sure play poker. Then, he bites the corner of his lip, sighs a little, and stands. "It's just. If that signal’s on that means Batgirl or—well. They found something out urgent enough to bring him back to Earth from the middle of space, and considering, it probably wouldn't be the best idea for both of you to reunite just yet."

"I don't believe it," Jason says. He looks down the dizzying expanse of air below him. Twelve stories up and he still feels claustrophobic. He doesn't quite know what to call the things that are battling for dominance in his chest. "Bruce isn’t even on this planet? What is it? I'm just not a high enough priority right now?”

"No Jason, of course you're--"

"Sure. Right. Whatever," Jason says, and for some reason, he feels like suddenly he's in the middle of a break-up that's about to get nasty. "Daddy's plate is too full; I'll have to try again later. Maybe when the stakes are higher? Maybe when I've done something that's worthy of his attention?"

"You know that's not what I mean." 

"Maybe. Maybe not. What do you mean, then?"

Dick frowns at him, and Jason really hates this conversation now. He feels like he’s lost control of all the stupid things in his life, like he should have known Dick would only need him around for a couple of hours when Jason himself only just began to notice how much he might need Nightwing in his life. It’s unfair, and it’s childish, and he thought he’d gotten over this after dying and resurrecting and becoming a murderer. 

It’s too much.

"I have to go," Dick says again, slowly, like maybe he's trying to keep anger out of his voice. "I'm leaving tonight, and I will try to be back by tomorrow night. I'm asking you to please not leave."

Jason crosses his arms, clenches a muscle in his jaw.

"Okay," Jason says bitterly. "Why do you need to leave?"

At that, Dick finally looks away. Jason feels, in that moment, like his every breath is dependent on Dick's attention, and hates that a little, too.

"I don't know."

"Yeah," Jason says, but all he hears is _I don’t know if I can tell you_. He knows the tight upturn of his lips can barely even be considered a smirk, even by his standards. "Probably above my pay grade, huh?"

"Jason—"

"Just go!" he all but yells back, surprised by his own up-swell of anger. "I'm sure there are a plethora of things more important than my resurrection to Batman. I don't care. Just. Go."

He wants to add _come back soon_ , but he's bitter and too sullen to let Dick off the hook this time. Jason stands finally, the tips of his toes peeking just off the precipice, and tries to shake the inexplicable chill that's washed over him.

He gets a sudden, violent urge to leap off the building; the way he used to back when he was Robin. He imagines that he’d fall way past when he really should have fired a grappling hook, would be close enough to the ground to smell the asphalt before he’d swoop away. He gets a little lost in the idea really, turns his back on Nightwing because it may be easier to let him go if he doesn’t have to physically see him and thinks about the cold Gotham air against his skin, the smell of gunpowder and blood, the sound a batarang makes as it knocks into wood…

Then, a second later, Dick's hand is on his shoulder, turning him back around and pulling him down a step and away, so he’s about a foot from the edge of the rooftop; the grip on his shoulder is a little rough, a bit too-tight, and a bit more desperate than even last night when he all but begged Jason to come with him. He's close now, so close Jason can see the birthmark on the underside of his jaw, the desperation that's lurking in his eyes just under his faked-calm. His hand comes up and caresses the side of Jay’s face, eyes darting to almost every spot of his features. He leans in closer, just enough so that Jason can feel his breath against his mouth.

“Please be here when I come home,” he all but whispers. “I won’t lose you again.”

His eyes drop down to Jason’s lips, and he bites the corner of his before he closes the tiny gap between them and presses a soft kiss on him. Jason draws in a breath sharply, waits an eternal heartbeat before he lets his eyes slide closed and presses more firmly towards Dick. Just a bit, enough to get Dick’s mouth open so he can feel the electric slide of his tongue against Dick’s. He sets a hand on the small of Dick’s back, feels him shiver at the contact. 

All too soon, Dick pulls away; his eyes seem to bore holes in him for a second, before he rests his forehead roughly against Jason’s.

“I can’t lose you, not again,” he says, his voice an octave lower now; Jason can feel it rumbling under his hands.

“Okay,” Jason says. “I’ll try.”

That, at least, manages to bring a tiny smile back to Dick’s lips. 

“That’s all I’m asking for,” is Dick’s tragically cliché response. 

“You are so terrible,” Jason says, but his voice is all soft and fond; instead, “terrible” sounds more like all the words he wants to say instead (great, wonderful, unreal, _perfect_ ).

“You know it,” Dick answers, then he pushes away. “See you soon, Little Wing.”

“Just go!” Jason says, but Dick’s already rushed across the rooftop. Two seconds later he dives off the edge of the building, spinning once, twice, three times like the showoff that he is before he fires a grappling hook and disappears.

Okay. So two days without Dick in Gotham. He can deal with that. 

Probably.

(He lasts about half the day)

Because six hours later, Arsenal of all people finds him where Jason is still sitting at the top of the building. He’s bleeding from the side of his scalp and is cradling his tech arm with his other. It hangs at an awkward angle and twitches feebly every so often. And when he says “I need your help,” Jason just. He just goes with him, like they’re friends, like he’s a superhero again, like he’s worked with this kid from the start.

He’ll be back soon, he promises to himself. He has to be.

*

Dick makes it to the manor in record time, and with each mile he goes, something twists a little harder in the pit of his stomach. He thinks about his wild, impulsive decision to kiss Jay (something he didn’t know he wanted until he was there doing it), hopes the phantom caress of his hands will be enough to let him keep Jason Todd this time around. 

God, was Jason ever this distracting when he was a snot-nosed kid running around in Dick’s uniform? (The answer is yes, of course, you can’t be _Robin_ and not be brilliant and annoying and distracting, in Dick’s book) But he really shouldn’t be dwelling on those things, no matter how much Dick wants to run back to Jason and find a way to keep the guy’s head on straight. 

When he gets there Alfred is tight-lipped and stoic, which can’t be good news, but that in no way prepares Dick for the all-around soap opera that’s unfolding down in the batcave. Because apparently Babs went and found _Bruce Wayne’s long lost biological child_ , who takes one look at Dick, raises an eyebrow, and says in the most pretentious way a nine-year-old could possibly manage “Oh. It’s just you then?”

“Okay, first what,” Dick says, and for the sake of his sanity pretends he didn’t see the kid roll his eyes. He turns to Barbara and Tim instead. There’s no way this kid isn’t related to Bruce, unless he’s some kind of clone that wasn’t forcibly aged up the way Superboy and Arsenal were. 

“Not a clone,” Batman says from somewhere in the shadows, proving that he can in fact read minds. 

“That’s good to know,” Dick says faintly. “So…I take it Babs found the kid?”

“ ‘The kid,’ as you say, does not like it when you speak about him as if he’s not here.”

“His name’s Damian,” Tim says, neatly sidestepping the comment. Dick thinks he sees an eye twitch under the mask, but he’s not sure, “Damian, this is Nightwing.”

“The first of the Detective’s protégés,” Damian says. Somehow, he manages to look down his nose at Dick, nevermind that he’s about four feet shorter than him. “I assumed you’d be more impressive.”

“Hey!” Dick says on impulse. “I’m very impressive!”

“But maybe not to the kid who is ostensibly heir to the League of Assassins,” Barbara says in a tone that is way too casual, if you ask Dick.

Dick’s starting to feel like he should have been briefed before this impromptu family reunion. 

“I really think I should have been briefed before walking into this mess,” Dick says. 

“We’ll talk about your tendency to go off-grid later,” Batman says, which is just. Great. Wonderful. 

“I had very important stuff that I was doing,” Dick says in his defense. When everyone blinks at him expectantly, he cowers a little and adds: “Soul-searching stuff. You know. It’s important to take time off for yourself every once and a while.”

Which seems to be enough of an answer, even if it only gets him some exasperated sounding sighs in response. He grits his teeth and mentally prepares himself for all the shit he’s going to get later on, but really. They can’t expect him to just _tell them_ everything that’s happened with Jason. Not only because of the weird half-formed plan of revenge that Dick really hopes he stopped but because…yeah, because of the kissing and the wanting Jason all to himself thing. 

He knows in the pit of his stomach that Jason won’t hang around if the entire bat-clan suddenly shows up and confronts him. Hell, Dick would scamper too, if their places were reversed. 

“Why are we here, Batgirl?” he asks, carefully avoiding Batman’s gaze. Just in case the whole mind-reading thing sniffs out his secret. 

“I need your help,” Damian says. 

He looks pretty grumpy about it, if you ask Dick, but the kid is nine years old at most, what sort of problems could he possibly have gotten into? 

The answer is a lot. A lot of problems. 

Starting with the fact that his mother (Thalia Al Ghul, and boy, is Dick so not ready to hear about how that particular hook-up came about) has ostensibly disappeared after saving her father (yes, that Rhys Al Ghul, the man in charge of the _League of Assassins_ ). There is a whole lot of information after that, about assassins hired for protection who are now hunting them down, Lady Shiva being recruited into The Light, and something about immortality that doesn’t quite make sense.

“And I thought I had a complicated childhood,” Tim says after Damian’s told them about as much of the story as he’s able to. 

“Rhys Al Ghul is dead,” Batman says then. He takes a step forward and frowns down menacingly at Damian.

“The Dragon’s Head cannot be killed,” is Damian’s answer; for a second, he sounds much older than he actually is, like some kind of prophet. “He bides his time, then strikes.”

“Okay,” Tim answers. “So what do you want us to do about it?”

“I want you to avenge my mother’s death,” Damian says, and pulls a small, beat up sheet of paper from one of his pockets.

“Thalia’s dead?” Batgirl asks. 

“I believe so,” is his response. “Someone left me this threat, along with this.” He pulls something else out of his pocket, a tissue neatly folded over itself. When he unwraps it, Dick is only mildly surprised to see the long strands of hair wrapped meticulously coiled, and a thin silver band. “This ring is my mother’s,” Damian continues with no inflection in his voice at all. Scary how much like Bruce he already seems to be. “If you will not help me then I will do it myself.”

After a short pause, Bruce comes up to Damian and extends a gloved hand out, palm up. Damian squints up at him, as if he’s suspicious, before placing the napkin and its contents in his hand.

“What does the letter say?” he growls.

Barbara unfolds the sheaf of paper and glances it over once. Then, she clears her throat and begins to read:

“Your empire is crumbling, little dragon. What will you do when there is no one left to hide you? The Light can show you the way.”

“That’s impossible,” Dick says, speaking for the first time in what feels like forever. “The Light was destroyed after the whole alien-invasion thing.”

And yet, the proof is staring them straight in the face; evidence that some form of them still exists.

“I received that note almost a month ago,” Damian says, then scowls. “I think. Cassandra will know exactly.”

“Cassandra?” Tim and Dick say simultaneously. Barbara has time to grimace hugely before a young girl just _appears out of thin air, holy Jesus, what?_

Or well. More accurately: she pushes herself out of some dark recess of the batcave and slithers to Damian’s side as quick as a ghost. She’s very skinny, with long, lank hair falling into her face, but her eyes are calculating and suspicious. They dart from face to face, as if scanning each of them for something. 

Dick, with perhaps what little sanity he has left, says: “I don’t even want to know, do I?”

No one answers him, which seems to prove Dick’s point. He manages to share a pointed look with Tim just so he feels like he’s not the only one out of the loop before Bruce starts barking orders at them.

“Actually,” Dick chimes in, “I can’t. I have to—”

“If the Light is indeed reforming themselves, we have to know about it,” Bruce says in a voice that brooks no argument. “There is nothing else more important.”

“But what about—”

“Nothing,” Bruce repeats, and Dick wilts a little.

He thinks about Jason, standing with his feet halfway off the edge of a building, looking like he was ready to fall or take flight. He remembers the way his lips felt against his own, the warmth of his body, the curve of his reluctant smirk when Dick promised him he’d be back. 

“Okay,” Dick says, guilt settling down in his stomach. He looks away from everyone for a moment, almost dizzy with the remembered sound of Jason’s voice saying _I don’t have a home anymore_. He tries for a very long moment to not feel like he’s proving Jason right.

He doesn’t quite accomplish it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bonus points for whoever caught the very vague Koriand'r moment at the beginning.


End file.
